Cynthia Harrod-Eagles - Anna

‘No, I can’t,’ she said. ‘What did you do with your free time, when you were off duty?’

‘There was never time to do much, except drink a bottle of wine in the mess, and play cards perhaps. When we had a few days off, we’d go to Tiflis, for the baths. Have you ever had a Georgian bath? No, I don’t suppose you would have. The baths in Tiflis are the best in the world. First the attendants rub you down with goat’s-hair gloves and soap, and knead and pummel you and rinse you off, and then you lie down on a towel and they walk up and down your back in their bare feet.’

Anne laughed incredulously, and he looked at her, showing the first sign of animation – of humanity – so far. He almost smiled.

‘It’s true! It’s the most exquisite feeling – I can’t tell you! All your joints and muscles click and crack and you can feel all the aches being massaged away. You feel wonderful afterwards – and then you go down into a sort of cave, where there’s a bath cut out of the mountain rock itself, and the hot mineral water pours into it constantly. And you just sit in that for as long as you like. There’s lots to do in Tiflis, but mostly we just go there for the baths. It’s worth the trip.’

He had grown almost expansive, tempting Anne to rashness. ‘And are the girls of Tiflis pretty?’ she asked.

He looked at her strangely. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, as though it had not occurred to him to look. Perhaps it hadn’t. It had been a stupid thing to say anyway, given what had been between them. She wanted to take it back, to apologise, but that would have been a worse mistake than the first. She could only try to build it into a commonplace.

‘Is there one more pretty than the others? Is there anyone special?’

‘I’m not interested in girls,’ he said, and suddenly looked directly into her eyes, for the first time as though he really saw her. ‘There was only one I ever cared for.’

Anne’s throat closed up. She sought for something neutral to say, but her wretched mind let her down. How would he interpret her silence? He was looking at her thoughtfully, and the corners of his mouth had softened, and she could not imagine where his thoughts might be. But when he spoke again, he said merely. ‘So my sister has come out at last? Were you there? Did you see her?’

‘Yes – and she was a credit to your family,’ Anne said, glad to be able to offer uncontroversial praise. ‘She’s turned into a very attractive young woman – not beautiful, precisely, but striking, and she’s very popular amongst the people of her own age.’

‘She writes to me now and then – lists of gowns and dancing partners,’ he said wryly. ‘Those seem to be her only concern. I thank God she can still be so innocent. I thank God she was spared what happened at Chastnaya.’ He lapsed into a silence she did not know how to break; it was the first time he had referred so directly to what had happened. At last he roused himself to say, ‘I suppose she leads my grandmother a merry dance.’

‘You haven’t seen her for a long time, of course,’ Anne said neutrally.

‘No. I wouldn’t go back to be sucked in by Gran’mère again.’ He frowned, his eyes on the distance, and added softly, ‘Too much has happened to me, in any case. You can’t go back.’

Warmth sprang up in her for this lonely man who had shut himself away from kindness. She wanted to touch him in some way, but could think of no way of reaching him that would not be dangerous for them both. Suddenly he looked at her. ‘So Basil Andreyevitch is in Moscow? I suppose you’re going to join him shortly – or is he coming here?’

She was startled by the abrupt change of subject; fumbled for words. ‘Sergei, Basil Andreyevitch and I, we – we don’t live together any more.’ He looked hard at her, forcing her to amplify. ‘We had – certain differences. We felt it was better if we – had our own establishments.’

‘Oh,’ he said, and a variety of expressions seemed to flicker across his face as he digested the news: surprise, acceptance, gratification perhaps? And then a puzzled frown. ‘But then – what are you – I mean, who is–’

She was beginning to understand a little of his state of mind, and to be alarmed by it, and to wonder how she would explain and how he would react; but he got no further with the questions he didn’t know how to ask, and she had no opportunity to break it to him tactfully. At that moment there was a sound of cavalry boots on the bare polished floorboards within the house, and a male voice calling cheerfully to the butler that he had breakfasted already; and then Nikolai came out on to the terrace with a smile of eager welcome on his face for Anne. He evidently had no idea Sergei was there; when he saw his son, the smile drained away completely for an instant, and then sprang up again, new, but different. He held out his arms.

‘Seryosha! My dear boy! I didn’t know you were here! What brings you to Vilna? But I see you’re in uniform – have you come to serve? You have a command? If not, I can get Tolly to…’

His voice trailed away, for Sergei had come violently to his feet, and his face was pulling this way and that with rage and pain. For an instant Anne saw the child inside the shell of the man: hurt, baffled, betrayed. He had been on the point of opening his heart to her, and this was how his trust had been repaid; now he wanted to strike out.

‘Yes, I see now! I see it all! Oh this is very cosy, isn’t it?’ he cried bitterly. He looked from his father to Anne with identical loathing. ‘No wonder your husband’s left you! I should think any decent man would. Only a – a scoundrel like my father would dream of living with such an unprincipled–’

‘Sergei!’ Nikolai cried, more astonished than angry. ‘What the devil are you talking about?’

‘Don’t speak to me! Don’t dare to speak to me!’ he cried out, the living pain close enough to the surface now to make his voice quiver. ‘I never would have thought my father – my own father – would be so…’ He turned back to Anne, like a creature at bay. ‘Don’t you have any scruples? Is it just any man for you?’

‘Seryosha, don’t,’ she said painfully. ‘I love him.’

‘It was him all the time, wasn’t it, while you were pretending to be so good and pious, taking care of my sisters – my God, and with my step-mother living in the same house!’

‘No – not like that!’

‘I saw in Pyatigorsk – but I didn’t believe it. I thought afterwards I’d been mistaken. I was sorry for what I’d said – I wanted to apologise. Apologise, my God!’ He laughed harshly. ‘And that – that thing,’ he jerked his head in the direction of the house, ‘is that his? Or can’t you be sure?’

Anne could bear no more. She struck him open-handed on the cheek, putting all her weight behind it, hurting herself, she guessed, more than him. For the flicker of an instant she saw in his eyes that he almost struck her back; and then so fast it seemed like a dream, the rage and pain had gone, and the hard young face was as unmoving and unemotional as when he had first arrived, revealing nothing in any feature, showing only a faint pink mark where she had struck him.

He drew himself to attention and bowed curtly to her. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said, and it was as little like an apology as if he had taken out a pistol and shot her. ‘I should not be here.’

He pivoted on his heel and left them, without a glance at his father. The sound of his boots diminished through the house, and Anne, shaking with distress at the raw emotions which had been exposed, turned to Nikolai for comfort.

‘He will never forgive us,’ she said. ‘I should have told him at once, but I didn’t know how. Oh Nikolai– !’

But Nikolai was standing as he had been standing since the first outburst, staring ahead of him in the blankness of shock which precedes, and for a blessed time blots out, pain. His hands were raised a little, as though to protect himself from a blow; and he was crying.

On the 24th of June, the Emperor gave a grand reception and ball at his newly acquired house, Zakret. The idea once conceived grew rapidly under the encouragement of Prince Volkonsky, and word soon spread that the ball was to be a fête champetre – the currently fashionable name, as Anne had learnt with amusement, for a fête champetre. A parquet floor was to be built on one of the riverside lawns, and over it a flower-bedecked pavilion was to be raised; there were to be floral grottoes around the lawns, lit with candles inside coloured lamp bowls, and four bands playing at different points in the park; but the plan for the crowning glory of fireworks to end the evening was reluctantly abandoned in view of the military situation.

The preparations did not proceed without incident. On the day of the ball, at around noon, the supporting wooden pillars began to bow, and moments later the entire pavilion collapsed with a terrible rumbling crash, trapping one of the workers under the wreckage. So intense had been the interest in the project, that there were enough idlers to witness the disaster for the rumour soon to spread all through Vilna that it was not an accident at all. Napoleon had planned the whole thing as an assassination attempt on the Emperor; and the pavilion’s architect, Schultz, whose name proved he was a German and therefore an ally of the French, was really his secret agent.

Demands were made for Schultz to be questioned under torture until he confessed, but they came too late; as soon as he realised what had happened, and what might have happened if the pavilion had collapsed later in the evening, the terrified architect rushed away down the lawn and flung himself into the river, and was swept away by the current and drowned.