‘Yes,’ she said. She had seen how long in his face. There was far more grey now in his hair, and his eyes were shadowed with more than weariness. ‘I almost didn’t come. I thought you might think I was a nuisance.’

‘Why did you come? You couldn’t have known it would be in my power to visit you.’

‘I hoped, that’s all.’

She was cradled safe in his arms; and his child was cradled safe in her womb. For a moment it was in her mind to tell him, but the thought of all he had before him deterred her. His being here, though for her the whole purpose of life, was for him only an interlude between worries more pressing than she could imagine, and probably more real to him at the moment than she was. No, this was not the time. A better time would come, when this could be the most important thing in the world for both of them.

‘What is it?’ he asked, feeling her preoccupation.

‘I’ve missed you so much,’ was all she said.

‘And I you. I thought of you often, imagined you safely in Moscow, shopping in the Kuznetsky Most, seeing the play at the Grand Theatre, riding in the park. It pleased me to know you were safe, and far from the terrible things I was witnessing.’

No, she thought, this was not the time.

‘Will there really be a battle now?’ she asked at last.

‘Yes, I think so. It’s time. The French are greatly weakened, and our numbers are almost even now.’

‘And then will it be over?’

He didn’t answer for a while. ‘I don’t know. If it were anyone but Napoleon. He is three months from the border, and winter will be here before three months are up. Caution, common sense, should have turned him back before now; but he still comes on. I don’t know if it’s in him to withdraw. When we fight, we will have to beat them thoroughly enough to convince even him. I don’t know if we can. His soldiers are skilled in war, with experienced commanders. Ours are only very strong and very determined. It could go either way.’

She pressed closer. ‘You will – be careful?’ she said, feeling a little ashamed even as she asked it of him. Men’s pride was different from women’s. Women saw no point in being heroic and dead – far better to live to fight another day.

He smiled – she felt the curve of his cheek move against hers. ‘Don’t worry, I shall be well out of the way, at Kutuzov’s elbow. Great generals and their staff command from the rear, you know! Except Napoleon – though perhaps even he may be cautious this time, having more to lose. Perhaps we can send the Cossacks after him. The French have a mortal dread of the Cossacks – even the word has taken on power, like some evil incantation!’

‘The Cossacks seem to have a great respect for Kutuzov.’

‘Yes, they feel he’s one of them. They like Bagration, too – and I’ve heard one or two approving comments on young Captain Kirov.’

‘Have you seen Sergei since – since Vilna?’

‘Oh yes, of course. He reports to me in Tolly’s absence.’ He sighed. ‘It’s very hard to have your own son look at you as though you’re a stranger. I can see, from his point of view… and yet, I don’t know what else we could have done.’

‘Nothing,’ she said. And there was nothing either of them could have done to protect Sergei from his fate, from what happened in the mountains of the Caucasus. ‘He’ll get over it, in time,’ she added, not because she believed it, but because she hoped it, and wanted to comfort him.

‘I pray when all this is over he’ll come to understand. I’ll spend time with him, get to know him. I never really knew him you know. It seems to be the fate of males of our class. I never knew my father either – though of course he died when I was quite young. I should have taken more trouble with Sergei. He was away from me too much while he was growing up. His grandmother spoiled him. And then–’

There seemed nothing more to say on that – nothing that was safe. Anne’s mind wandered on over a number of thoughts, alighting here and there and moving on again restlessly. When at last she drew breath to open a new subject, she heard the small but unmistakeable sound of a snore. His mental excitement had worn off at last, and he had fallen into the profound sleep of the exhausted.

The next morning, Sunday the 1st of September, Kirov woke early out of force of habit, and for a moment lay in a daze, not knowing where he was. The familiar feeling of dread which had attended every waking for two months past was overlaid by another sensation he could not yet identify; and then Anne moved slightly, and memory flooded back. She was there beside him, warm and smooth and sweet-smelling, everything that was soft and feminine and alive: the antipathy of war, which was cold and dirt and waste, and the stupidity of death.

The very fact of her presence seemed to throw the hatefulness of the campaign into sharp relief: six hundred miles of road lined with dead horses and dying men; with villages destroyed and burned, green fields churned into raw wounds of mud and debris; rivers polluted, crops trampled; towns that had been happy and industrious left for wrecks, filled only with beggars and with the sick and the wounded, dying of typhus and gangrene. And for what? So that one man might add another empty title to his collection.

With the restlessness of suffering, he turned on his side towards Anne. He reached out to touch her, ran his hand over her smooth flank, across her gently convex belly, up to the soft heaviness of her breasts. The two conditions, of war and peace, rested side by side in his mind, equally real – or was it equally unreal? Slaughter and mud and destruction, the campaign, the world of men; and the sleeping woman beside him, the wholeness of her unblemished skin, the scent of her clean hair.

He was aware that she was smooth and young and sweet, while he was gaunt and grey and weary. After months on campaign he didn’t even smell clean any more. How could she lie with him and love him? How could he put aside what he had witnessed and love her? Could anything ever be the same again? But which was the reality – the palace from which she came, or the muddy tent where he had spent his last night? Here, this place, was a kind of half-way house, a compromise between the two worlds – and perhaps it was the only reality.

His moving hand had woken her, she was turning towards him, soft and sleep-hot and wanting him. His body responded to her automatically with a weary surge of desire, as if in the middle of death it were desperate to create life. He wished he could do that one thing – make something new and good in the middle of this desolation. If he could leave her quickened, he might leave her with less despair. He stretched over her, entered her, and she moved to meet him, receiving him readily, taking him into her. He held her in his arms, but he felt separated from her. His mind stood apart, knowing he loved her without being able to feel it. She smiled and curved under him, still half asleep, murmuring with pleasure; he mated her because he needed to.

And afterwards he wondered if he had succeeded, and then thought that it was a foolish thing to have done, because there would be no knowing until long after the battle whether she were pregnant or not. They slept again, and when they woke the second time she smiled at him and he kissed her, and Anne saw that he had already left her, that the campaign was more real to him than her, and that he had gone back to it. What was left was just the shell.

Before they had finished breakfast, Adonis came in to say that a messenger had come from General Tolly, recalling Kirov to duty at once. There had been a disagreement over the new site at Ghzatsk almost as soon as the men had begun digging in. General Bennigsen complained that it was impossible to hold, and that it had a wood in the middle of it, and Tolly, still angry over the abandoning of the position at Tsarevo, asked him tautly whether he had anything better to suggest.

Bennigsen had retorted that while travelling in his carriage between Mozhaisk and Ghzatsk he had noted several splendid places, which might have been created for the sole purpose of fighting battles. The doubtful Kutuzov had been persuaded: another move was ordered. The Russian army was once again withdrawing along the Smolensk-Moscow High Road, and Kirov’s presence was urgently needed to ride out and inspect some of these ‘ideal’ battlegrounds and report back to the commander-in-chief on their suitability.

‘I must go,’ Nikolai said. ‘I will send you word when I can.’

‘At least you are moving nearer to me,’ she said lightly.

‘Anna, I may not be able to come again. You had better go back to Moscow.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. ‘I will go when I must, but not yet. Don’t worry about me, Nikolasha – I’ll take care of myself, and not put myself in danger. But I’ll be here, in case you are able to come again.’

He nodded, a frown of thought already between his brows, and kissed her absently, and went, almost with relief; his body following where his mind had already gone.

Site of the Battle of Borodino

Chapter Twenty-Nine