‘We have our own provisions,’ Kirov said. ‘All we need is shelter for the night. We’ll ride on in the morning.’

The Cossack leader nodded. ‘Don’t you worry, sir. Come along with us, and we’ll find a peasant house where you can stay. You don’t mind roughing it, I suppose?’

‘Not at all. A barn will do.’

‘We’ll find you somewhere better than that. And we’ll pass the word down the line, that you’re to be looked after. There are plenty of izby off the road that haven’t been destroyed, if you know where to look for them. The peasants are out for French blood, and they like chopping up the prisoners we bring them, and the foragers who stray too far from the road. But they’ll take care of you all right, and your good lady, don’t worry.’ Kirov exchanged a look with Adonis, who shrugged slightly, and then nodded. It was not, he thought, as though they had any choice about accepting the Cossacks’ help. But it would make their journey easier, and it would be as well for them to be granted safe passage, in case the angry peasants mistook them for French refugees.

The Cossack party crowded round them, and they left the path under their escort and rode through the trees, the pace picking up, despite having to wind in and out of the trunks, to a fast trot. Anne had to keep her wits about her so as not to part company with her mount when he dodged one way round a tree, and she the other. It was almost completely dark when they trotted into a clearing and confronted a log-built, two-storey peasant house, from whose chimney a cheering plume of smoke was rising ghostly grey in the gloom.

The leader gave a high chirruping call, like the kee-wick of a hunting owl. It was evidently a signal, for at once the door of the izba opened and a trapezium of yellow light fell out across the invisible grass. A stocky peasant stood there, with a precautionary short-handled axe in one hand, and what looked like a piece of bread in the other.

The leader jumped down from his pony and held a short, sotto-voce conversation with him, after which he turned to Kirov and said cheerfully, ‘All right, Colonel. Lev here will give you all a bed for the night, and put you, on your way tomorrow, first light. We’ll pass the word about you. You’ll be all right.’

‘Thank you,’ Kirov said. ‘We’re very grateful.’

‘Nothing to it, Colonel!’ He mounted and wheeled round after his men. ‘Don’t forget,’ he called cheerfully as they trotted away into the darkness, ‘when you catch him, cut the bastard’s balls off!’

Inside the hut was just like any other – the stove, the long wooden table, the benches, the shelves high up with their few belongings. Anne made automatic obeisance to the Beautiful Corner, remembering the first time she had made the gesture, long ago in the company of Irina, and how strange it had seemed. It came naturally to her now. She wondered what her father or Miss Oliver would think to see her cross herself before an icon of St Sergei. How shocked they would be! England was far away now, like the most distant of dreams. She did not believe that she would ever see it again: Russia had taken hostage of her now.

The peasants were kindly, shy and monosyllabic. They offered them a seat near the stove, and one of the women began preparing tea, while two of the young men went out with Adonis to settle the horses.

‘We won’t take your food,’ Anne said at once, thinking they probably had very little to begin with, and would be worried about their stores being depleted by the unexpected burden of two dvoriane and a large mercenary. ‘We have brought food of our own with us.’

But one of the women, middle-aged and broad-bodied, but hard, like a rosehip, rather than fat, drew herself up with unexpected dignity and said, ‘No, Barina, you are our guests. You keep your food for later. You may need it.’

‘You are very kind,’ Anne said. ‘But we do not wish to leave you short.’

‘While we have food, we will share it. So God orders us to be hospitable, lest we entertain an angel unawares. You are welcome to all we have, Barina.’

So they shared the evening meal, a simple affair of cabbage soup, black bread and salted cucumbers. Afterwards the man of the house brought out a flask of kvass, and a pipe was lit and passed amongst the men. Kirov bravely shared it, and they all talked about the war and what would happen next. Meanwhile one of the women had guessed Anne’s condition, and on the women’s side of the stove there followed a deep and detailed discussion of all the pregnancies and labours they had known. Anne found it interesting that none of them suggested that she was doing anything out of the ordinary by riding with Kirov in her condition. They were perfectly accustomed to working until the last moment of their own gestations; the idea of taking to the sofa for nine months was alien to them.

When the time came to retire, they gave Anne and Nikolai the best places on top of the stove, where they slept warm – almost too warm. The night seemed to pass very quickly. The old woman was up before first light, stirring up the stove and lighting the samovar for tea; and by the time the sun rose mistily on the first day of November, they were mounting their ponies in the clearing, their breath smoking on the cold, uncharitable air.

They came up to the road a few miles west of Ghzatsk. The first thing they saw was a five-foot long, elaborately wrought gold torchere, lying at a drunken angle half in and half out of a deep rut at the side of the road: a piece of plunder from Moscow, presumably, that had fallen from a cart. A little further along, however, they came upon a trail of scattered goods – a dozen beautifully bound books, a pair of candelabra, a rolled-up tapestry tied with string, a canteen of silvery cutlery, a framed portrait of a woman in the dress of the previous century. It looked like a deliberate attempt to lighten the load of a carriage in trouble.

They rounded a bend in the road, and there before them was the carriage itself, at the bottom of a slope which led into a ford and up again. The carriage stood – or rather leaned on a broken axle – across the ford, its doors hanging open, more plunder scattered around it, as the occupants had presumably searched amongst their loot for the most portable objects. As they drew closer, they saw something else lying on the ground beyond the carriage.

Half a dozen carrion crows flapped and hopped away from it as they approached, and Anne turned her face away, feeling a little nauseous. It was a dead horse – so thin its ribs and hips seemed almost ready to break through its dull hide. Its tongue hung out of its mouth, and there was a white tide mark along its neck where its labours had raised a foam. What was peculiarly horrible was that chunks had been roughly hacked out of it – and not by the beaks of carrion crows, either.

Kirov remembered Kutuzov’s words: I’ll see him eat horseflesh! It was plain that the retreating French army was desperately short of food; as desperately as it was short of fodder for the horses. This one looked as though it had died in the effort of dragging the carriage out of the shallow ford into which its momentum had carried it; and to judge by its condition, it had been lucky to get this far.

Adonis jumped down from his horse and passed the reins to Kirov, walked over to the dead horse, and bent to examine its hooves. He straightened up and called out, ‘Come and look at this, Colonel.’

Kirov urged the horses nearer, until they caught the scent of their dead brother, and snorted and goggled and would not go any further. Adonis lifted a hoof and angled it towards him.

‘No spikes. These aren’t winter shoes,’ he said. ‘See – smooth as glass, and a ball of frozen mud on its sole. No wonder the poor beast fell and couldn’t get up.’

‘Not winter shoes?’ Kirov said dazedly. ‘But – Napoleon sat in Moscow for a month doing nothing! Surely to God he must have had all his horses reshod? If he did nothing else, he must have done that!’

Adonis shrugged, and dropped the hoof, and came back to reclaim his mount. Anne watched in silence. Even she knew that every horse in Russia was reshod at the end of autumn with spiked shoes, so that they could get a grip on icy ground and packed snow. Without winter shoes, they would slip about hopelessly and fall every few steps.

Adonis was mounted. He took the rein of the packhorse, and they trotted on.

That was the first they saw of the debris left by the retreating Grande Armée, but it was not the last. Discarded plunder littered the road: statues and paintings and candelabra, gold plates and silver goblets, icons and altar furniture, tapestries and carpets, silk gowns and gauze scarves, ormolu clocks and porcelain figures, silver inlaid tables and delicate Louis Quinze chairs. The Grande Armée had stripped Moscow of everything it could carry away; but the desperate state of the horses had forced them to jettison their booty in the attempt to save their lives.

They soon stopped counting the dead horses. Every hundred yards or so they found another, and almost all had been rudely hacked by the starving soldiers, desperate for something – anything – to put in their stomachs. There were abandoned carts, and boulevard carriages whose light frames had not survived the roughness of the road. Some of them had evidently been partly destroyed to provide firewood to cook the lumps of horsemeat, for they found the remains of many fires, and occasionally charred bones, and the sticks they had speared the meat on.

They found any number of discarded arms, breastplates, helmets; cannons too, usually dismounted or spiked to prevent their being used by the enemy, presumably abandoned when there were no more draught horses to haul them. What was fleeing before them was evidently no longer an army, but a rabble of desperate men hoping to save their lives.