Russian series 03 - The Eagle's Fate (25 page)

‘It’s Lev!’ Nadya exclaimed faintly.

He stood quite still for a moment, staring at his sister, who suddenly became aware of a presence nearby and looked at him, then held out both hands and went to greet him. He picked her up, swung her round in a circle, then put her down fairly carefully and kissed her.

By now the attention of the nearer guests had been attracted to this extraordinary appearance, and their conversations were suspended as they watched with interest. Lev said something to Tatya with a self-conscious grin, looked about the room without appearing to see anyone but the one person he sought, located he, and set off across the floor towards her in a straight, purposeful line, passing right through the middle of several conversation groups on the way, but without noticing them.

By the time he reached a point about two yards behind Irina, almost everyone in the room had stopped talking and turned to watch. Irina suddenly became aware of the silence, glanced round, saw that everyone was looking in her direction, and turned right round with an expression of alarm on her face.

It turned to radiant joy within the space of a heartbeat, and she fairly flew into Lev’s arms. To the scandalised amusement of most of the audience, he kissed her with considerable passion and at great length.

‘I wish Schevich could see that!’ Andrei murmured.

‘What happened to him?’ Nadya enquired.

‘Returned to Moscow to review his silk-worms, I believe.’

Lev eventually stopped kissing Irina and put her back on her feet, but he still kept a firm hold on her as he beamed happily and rather vaguely about him, saying, ‘It’s all right, you know!’ as if to reassure everyone.

Tatya went over to him, laughing, and spoke quietly to him, apparently pointing put the unsuitability of his appearance in her civilised salon. He looked at himself in one of the wall-mirrors, pulled a face, then docilely released Irina and returned to the entrance doors, nodding affable greetings to friends and acquaintances and total strangers as he passed them, then went out and disappeared along the gallery, accompanied by a soberly-clad little man with sharp features and a vinegary expression, whom Nadya vaguely remembered was his valet.

Conversations were resumed, and Andrei remained beside Nadya—at a proper distance, of course—for some time without saying much, except that he twice enquired if she felt tired. At the second enquiry, she said, ‘I suppose Tatya has deputed you to keep watch on me.’

‘She did—er—mention something of the sort,’ he admitted.

‘She does that sort of thing quite often,’ Nadya agreed thoughtfully, but fortunately not as sadly as she felt at having her suspicions confirmed.

‘How do you mean?’

‘She gives one or other of her beaux a little task to do—she did it when we were still at school, for she had her admirers even then! When we had a little informal dancing-party, for instance, she would send one of them to ask a shy girl to dance, and another to talk to one of the mistresses who looked bored, and she always looked round to see who hadn’t a partner before she stood up herself. The odd thing is, they hardly ever seemed to mind. I suppose Tatya’s smile of approval is compensation enough!’ She spoke without any note of criticism or envy—only of affection and admiration for her friend’s good nature.

‘You class me among Tatya’s beaux, do you?’ Andrei enquired in a sharp tone.

‘Well, aren’t you?’

‘More of an old and close friend, I think.’

Pavel Kuzmich appeared in the full majesty of his best livery just then, and directed his underlings as they served refreshment, moving about the room with trays of tempting delicacies—little canapes, small plates of caviar and toast, lemon ices decorated with sugared rose-petals and violets, and glasses of wine of various sorts.

Lev returned in the midst of this, looking a great deal improved. He had bathed and changed and been shaved, his hair was as tamed as ever it could be, and he was now wearing a spotless and faultlessly-pressed uniform. He made his way about the room, stopping to exchange a few words here and there, and presently came upon Nadya, who was just finishing an ice, and Andrei, who was twiddling the stem of a glass between his finger and thumb and staring pensively into the golden wine.

‘I’m very glad to see you again after all this time, Nadya Igorovna!’ he said, kissing her hand. ‘And glad to see you safe, Andrei Ivanovich!’ He drew up a chair and sat down, taking a proffered glass of wine from a footman, which he raised to them both in a silent toast.

‘It’s good to see you home safe and well!’ Andrei replied. ‘Things haven’t been altogether pleasant these last four months, I believe?’

‘I’d not care to go through it again,’ Lev admitted. ‘I was sorry to hear about your hands. How are they? Not healed yet?’ He looked at the bandages with a puzzled frown.

‘Yes. They healed very well, all things considered.’

‘Yet they’re still bandaged?’

‘I haven’t managed to find a glovemaker who’ll undertake to fit me,’ Andrei replied frankly.

Lev thought for a minute, sipping his wine, and then said, ‘Quite a few men’ll be carrying the scars of this campaign. Other people—ladies in particular—will just have to become accustomed to them. Personally, I’ve a very poor opinion of anyone—male or female—whose sensibilities are too delicate to allow them to look on a scar that’s been honourably come by!’

‘I agree,’ Nadya said firmly.

Andrei looked from one to the other with remarkably little expression on his face, then flicked his eyebrows, set his glass down on the floor between his feet, and set about the knot of the bandage on his left hand with his teeth, worried it undone, and unwound the bandage in an untidy bundle. Then he did the same to the other one.

While he was occupied with this, Lev and Nadya conversed about what had been going on in Petersburg, already back on the easy, friendly terms of the days when they had met quite frequently. Lev evaded the one attempt she made to enquire about his recent experiences, so she took the hint and left the subject along, for he seemed to want to hear only of the comparatively trivial occupations of the Season.

When Andrei had both hands free, he beckoned over one of the footmen and dropped the tangled mass of bandages on to his tray, then joined in the conversation as if he had not been doing anything in particular, and Lev presently remarked quite casually, ‘Whoever tidied those for you did quite a neat piece of work!’ with a nod towards his hand.

‘A friend of yours, I believe—a foxy little fellow called Kusminsky.’

‘Ah yes! You couldn’t have been in better hand,’ Lev replied, smiling, and gave them a resume of his journey from Smolensk to Kaluga with the surgeon and sixty wounded men—and one female.

By the time he had finished, glossing over the more unpleasant detail, most of Tatya’s guests had gone. Lev went off to do his duty by the remainder until they had all gone, and then Tatya, looking round the now untidy salon with a pleased smile, thanked Pavel Kuzmich for the efforts of his staff, gathered Irina, Nadya, Lev and Andrei together with a graceful gesture, and they all went down to the garden-room to drink tea and talk for a while.

‘You’re not over-tired, Nadya?’ Tatya asked, with a close look at her friend.

‘No, not at all,’ she replied, which was fairly true now that the loud buzz of voices no longer surrounded her.

Chapter Ten

‘Well now,’ said Lev when they had all been served with their tea,’ about the wedding!’ He was sitting on a sofa with Irina, holding one of her small hands in his own large, square capable one.

‘But you’re hardly home yet!’ Tatya protested.

‘I’ve been home
hours
, and not some much as mentioned it before! How long does it take to arrange a wedding?’

Tatya considered the matter. ‘Mm—there’s the trousseau to be made, and Irina’s gown, the guest-list to be prepared and the invitations sent—you must decide where it’s to be here in the house, or in church, or in Ryazan…about three months, I should think!’

‘Three months!’ Lev sounded shocked.

‘And by then it will be lent, so that will put it off for just over another month, but then the thaw will have started, so you’ll have to wait for the roads to be passable again, or your guests won’t be able to come…shall we say June?’

‘We’ll say next week,’ Lev said flatly. ‘The trousseau can wait, we’ll have it in church, the guests will mostly already be here, and if your dressmaker can’t run up a suitable gown in a week, then Irina can wear one she already has. Any objections, Sparrow?’ he demanded, turning to Irina.

‘I do like a man who knows his own mind!’ Andrei murmured.

‘None at all,’ Irina replied calmly. ‘Except that I should like something with lace—I’ve always dreamed of a wedding-gown with lace on it!’

‘Mother’s Valenciennes is laid away upstairs somewhere,’ Tatya told her reflectively. ‘I’ll see if I can find it tomorrow.’

As there appeared to be nothing further to be said about the wedding, Andrei asked Lev,’ How’s your arm now? You said in one of your letters that you’d been wounded again. What happened?’

‘Nothing much,’ Lev replied. ‘It was the day we captured Borisov. The Admiral sent a troop of cavalry along the Smolensk road to see if anyone was around, and they ran straight into the French Army—well, Oudinot’s Corps, at least! The troopers galloped back into the town in a tearing hurry, just as the Admiral and all his staff were sitting down to a civilised dinner—porcelain service and plate, even
tablecloths
!

‘Everyone rushed out and legged it over the bridge, apart from a few provident souls like Boris and me, who’d kept their horses handy! We mounted, and were just leaving when the French arrived, and one of them was ill-mannered enough to put a musket-ball through my arm, right in the middle of the old scar, which had healed nicely! Very annoying!’

‘Had anyone seen it—a proper surgeon, I mean?’ Irina asked anxiously.

‘Indeed, my love! The best! Sir James Wylie, the Emperor’s own doctor, came to Vilna with him, and I asked him to take a look at it. He said that it may improve a little, but the muscles of the upper arm have been so torn and damaged that I’ll never have much strength in it. I can lift a forkful of food, if I don’t overload it, but not much more.’

‘It was kind of Sir James to see you,’ Tatya commented. ‘He rarely attends anyone below the rank of Grand Duke and only a few Princes!’

‘In Petersburg, maybe,’ Lev replied, ‘but in Vilna he was working in the hospitals alongside the Army surgeons! Most of the monasteries and the University and the bigger houses were packed with wounded and frostbite cases, theirs and outs…The surgeons couldn’t deal with a fraction of them!’

‘Were not the rest receiving any attention, then?’ asked Nadya, horrified.

‘No,’ Lev replied simply. ‘There wasn’t even anyone to remove the dead! The French had no food, no fuel, no bandages…and the townspeople wouldn’t give them any.’

‘But Vilna’s Lithuanian!’ Nadya exclaimed. ‘I thought they were sympathetic to the French?’

‘So they were, while the French were winning, but then they saw that the Russians were back in control they prudently changed sides,’ Lev replied grimly. ‘The city was in a chaotic state, and the Admiral had only about fifteen thousand men left by then, so there wasn’t much we could do to tidy up until Marshal Kutuzov arrived with the main Army.’

‘Why did the Admiral have so few men?’ asked Andrei. ‘He joined up with Tormassov’s Army in Volhinia, and I thought the Army of the North was supposed to reinforce him as well?

‘So it was!’ Lev replied, ‘but when it eventually arrived, it was on the
other
side of the French, and joined Kutuzov instead! The Admiral started from Turkey with about sixty thousand men, but he had to leave some to keep an eye on the Austrians, and garrisons in Minsk and the other towns we captured—or liberated, I should say, for they were ours to start with! He had between twenty and thousand left when we reached the Beresina, and a good many of those suffering from frostbite and wounds.

‘We’d no news from the Marshal—more post reached us from Petersburg than from our wily Commander-in-chief! By the time he caught us up in Vilna, I thought the Admiral might very well murder him, but they were icily polite to one another to start with. It was quite funny, really—they met outside the castle in Vilna, the Admiral in full dress uniform, very pink-cheeked and perky, and the old Marshal in his private’s forage cap and a shabby old greatcoat, all wrapped in shawls like an old granny! They were both
very
correct until the Marshal asked the Admiral if he would like his dinner-service back—the one we left on the table in Borisov!