In the spring, when the thaw came, Anne could imagine what would be revealed. It would not be a good place to be in the spring. The new snowfall lay like feathers over the old crust, and Anne had a sudden terror that the weight of her and her pony would break through it. Vividly she imagined them plunging through some weakened place into a gully full of corpses, which the carrion crows had not had time to pick clean before the snow came. She shook the hideous image away, and concentrated instead on the thought of Koloskavets and a blazing fire.

Taking their bearings from Borodino, they found the path at last by the pine trees growing along its margins, and Adonis sent his pony up the hillside in a series of plunging leaps, with Anne close behind him, and Nikolai leading the spare horse bringing up the rear. Now they were so close, every moment of delay before reaching shelter seemed intolerable. Surely it had never been so far up the hill as this? Surely they must have missed their way again, and be riding away from the house instead of towards it? Anne was desperate now to be out of the saddle, to rub her numb hands and feet, to rest, to eat hot food. She felt that another five minutes out here in the blizzard would break her heart; and yet five minutes were followed by five minutes more.

And then, quite suddenly, they were there: the grey walls had been invisible in the background of whirling snow until they came in sight of the black iron gates. They rode into the yard and out of the wind, and suddenly the snow was falling gently like a tame thing, like a holiday thing, for making snowballs and toboggan slopes. And there was Stenka in tulup and fur hat and huge boots, grinning toothlessly as he stumped forward to take the horses’ heads; and there was Zina in the doorway to the kitchen, smiling serenely, as if their arrival were nothing untoward, as if they had only been away on a day’s hunting.

‘Come in, Barina, and get yourself warm. If you wouldn’t mind stepping into the kitchen, Barina – the fire in the drawing-room’s laid but not lit. I’ll go up and do that as soon as I’ve helped you off with your things.’

‘Thank you, Zina. I shall be glad to get out of this saddle.’

Zina nodded calmly, watching them with her unfathomable eyes, accepting, unjudging. ‘The samovar’s almost on the boil. I can have tea for you in a few moments.’

Anne dismounted stiffly and handed the reins to Stenka, and trudged towards the open doorway and the light and warmth. War and invasion had convulsed the land, death and disease and starvation and horrors of every kind had been unleashed; men were this minute lying down in the snow and dying from cold and hunger; but it was impossible to think of any of that now. Zina had said the magic word tea, and somewhere in there ahead of her there was a fire.

The blizzard lasted for three days; but even had it stopped during the first night, they would not have gone on. They had reached a haven, and for the moment they did not want to leave it. Nikolai remembered how before the battle he had found Koloskavets a single reality set between two opposing and equally unreal worlds. Now, with nothing to see beyond the windows but featureless whiteness, it seemed the only reality, a small place hanging in oblivion, which had somehow survived the wiping-out of the rest of creation.

They had everything they needed. Zina told them they had not been troubled by looters or stragglers: too far off the road, and the French terrified equally of Cossacks and what they called Partisans – the returning peasants bent on revenge. There was firewood enough for the whole winter, if they needed it; there were roots and sacks of grain and smoked, dried meat in the cellar; and when the snow stopped, if they remained, Adonis and Stenka could go out into the forest and shoot game for fresh meat. Eventually, of course, they would have to leave. Anne supposed vaguely that they would go back to Tula in the first instance, for Shoora and Vsevka would need to know what had happened to them and to Lolya; but for the time being, they had reached a resting-place, and they were staying put.

The relief of being safe and out of the saddle was so great that they all experienced a kind of euphoria for the first few days. They discarded their travelling clothes, they bathed luxuriously – Nikolai shaved in hot water and emerged looking ten years younger, only very gaunt and hollow-cheeked. Anne washed her hair, and curled it, and when Nikolai saw her with it dressed for the first time in weeks other than in a plait, he smiled a long, slow smile and told her he’d forgotten how beautiful she was.

During those days of the blizzard when they were confined to the house, with nothing to do but sit by the fire looking into the flames, they talked. Not of the war, which was too horrible, and too unreal, nor of the past, which contained too much sorrow, but of their future together. They talked of Schwartzenturm, and what Nikolai meant to do to improve the land, the new succession-houses he meant to build, the modem crops he meant to try out.

‘Unless, of course,’ he said suddenly during one conversation, ‘you don’t want to live there? It occurs to me that perhaps you’d sooner we sold it and bought a new pomestia somewhere else.’

Anne laughed. ‘A fine time to have scruples, after you’ve planted acres of turnips and built a pinery! No, love, I’m happy to live there. I like Schwartzenturm.’

He smiled gratefully. ‘I don’t think Irina ever did,’ he offered, and she understood him.

‘I’m not jealous of her,’ she said. ‘I have you now – that’s all that matters.’

He put his arm round her and drew her against his shoulder, and she sighed comfortably. ‘We’ll be married as soon as possible,’ he said. ‘In Petersburg, I think. I don’t think Moscow will be a good place for either of us now.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to go back to Moscow. We’ll collect Rose, and go back to Petersburg. I wonder how she and Sashka will like each other?’ She smiled. ‘I shall have Sashka again! I can’t tell you how happy that makes me!’

‘I’m glad you feel like that. The poor child has lacked a mother so long. Even when Irina was alive, she never had any love for him.’

Anne grunted in acknowledgement, her eyes on the leaping flames. Outside the wind soughed around the house, but inside there was no sound but the conversational crackle of the fire, and the ticking of the clock on the chimney-piece.

After a while he said, ‘Where are you?’

‘I was thinking of Schwartzenturm,’ she said. ‘I was looking at the view from the top of the Black Tower; and taking Rose to see old Marya Petrovna and the tame pig; and going to mass in the little white church; and having guests to dinner, and sitting on the terrace in the White Nights.’

‘The White Nights!’ he said in a tone that told her how fantastic that seemed to him in the present circumstances. ‘Very proper, domestic dreams they are, too,’ he added. ‘Have you no higher ambition, Countess Kirova? Don’t you want to travel and see the world?’

‘I’ve done that already,’ she said. ‘Now I want to stay home.’ But the words had broken the mood. She thought of the rest of Europe, of England, of the seemingly endless war. ‘This will be the end of it for Bonaparte, won’t it?’ she asked him in a subdued voice.

He was a long time answering. ‘Yes,’ he said at last. ‘I think so. Even if he escapes with his life, I don’t see how he could survive politically, having failed, and having lost his whole army. It must be the end of him.’

‘And the end of the war?’

He didn’t answer that, deep in his own thoughts. ‘I told you once, didn’t I, that when a war is over, no one can really remember what it was all about. No one ever wins a war. We just survive it – or fail to.’

His son Sergei had died in this very room, turning his face away from his father, unyielding, unforgiving. The firstborn, dearest to the heart as the firstborn must always be: special, never-to-be-replaced. Without really being aware of it, he freed himself from Anne’s embrace and stood up, walked away towards the window, the pain of his thoughts needing movement. All his children lost: Sergei and Natasha – even Sashka, for he hardly knew him, the war having kept him so long away from home.

And Lolya, more lost than all, because she lived, and he would never see her again. Duvierge would survive, he was sure of that; he had the knack of it; and Lolya would survive with him. They would escape out of Russia, and she would be his, his possession, loved or unloved, trammelled by him, used by him; her youth and vitality passing untasted in the service of a man who could never deserve her.

He stared bleakly out of the window. Gone, all gone! Natasha and Yelena and Sergei; and how many others? So many thousands dead; and crops trampled, villages burned, lives torn apart, never to be put together again. No winners; only losers.

Anne got up and came to stand beside him, and seeing the blackness of his expression was afraid to touch him, though she needed him, needed his reassurance. The white wilderness of snow beyond the glass was an emptiness, a desert, as featureless as darkness.

‘We’ve lost everything,’ he said.

‘No,’ she said. If he thought that, it was the worst thing of all. ‘No! We still have so much.’ He didn’t respond to her, and she grew afraid, and tugged at his arm to bring him back to her. ‘We survived.’

‘Did we?’

His eyes came back to her reluctantly, and for a moment he looked so old and so tired that she felt a kind of terror, that she would lose him, because he no longer had the strength to love her. ‘Nikolasha,’ she said, and reaching out wildly she took both his hands and placed them over her belly. ‘This is what we have! Our love for the rest of our lives; being together! And the child!’