Anne heard no command pass between the Count and his body servant as to their destination, but he seemed to know well enough, and sent the horses forward into a confident trot. He must have told him where to go while I was talking to my coachman, Anne thought. On the footpath an acquaintance, Madame Gagarin, bowed to her, with eyebrows raised in mild surprise, but she barely noticed.
They left the main thoroughfares, and Anne soon lost her bearings, only regaining them when they passed out of the city over the Dorogomilov Bridge. She didn’t ask where they were going: she was only happy to be with him again. For the moment, he didn’t seem to need to talk, either. He sat beside her, not looking nor touching, his hands resting in his lap, seeming utterly relaxed.
The journey didn’t take very long; soon the carriage turned into a gateway, passed along a drive between tall, overgrown hedges, and pulled up before a large wooden house, painted terracotta red. It was very quiet – nothing but the sound of birds rioting in the overgrown shrubbery – and the house had an air of neglect. The paint was peeling here and there, silvery and sun-blistered on the shutters, and a creeper had grown over the upstairs windows.
‘Whose house is this?’ she asked at last, mildly.
‘It’s mine,’ he said. ‘It belonged to my first wife. I hardly ever come here now – when I’m in Moscow I usually stay with Mother – but I always kept it, just in case.’
‘Is it empty?’
He was examining the façade and the garden with a critical eye. ‘There’s a housekeeper, and her husband tends the grounds. Not very well, by the look of it. If ever I come here, I send word ahead, and they hire extra servants and get things ready.’
Now he looked at her, perhaps a little apologetically. ‘I thought we ought to go somewhere where we could talk privately. Where we wouldn’t be overheard.’
‘Yes,’ Anne said, seeing the sense of it. They needed to talk, although she felt that it didn’t much matter what they talked about. She looked up at the façade of the house, and it seemed like a face – patient, dumb, watchful, the half-shuttered eyes, the closed, secretive mouth. Was it the face of sin? she wondered, with distant curiosity.
‘Are you expected anywhere?’ he asked. ‘When do you have to be back?’
She hadn’t even considered that aspect of it, but now the thought came to her gloriously, obliterating all other considerations. Her formal, organised, careful and empty life had looked away for a moment, had inadvertently set her loose; no one knew where she was, and no one would wonder.
She smiled, lighting her whole face. ‘I have all day,’ she said.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Inside, the house smelled of dusty carpets. The housekeeper was evidently taken aback, wringing her hands and glancing back at her silent husband, who had emerged behind her from the kitchen with a line of foam on his upper lip. ‘If you had only let me know, master!’ she cried again and again. ‘I could have had everything ready for you.’
‘It doesn’t matter, Yasmin,’ he said patiently. ‘Go and make us some tea, and bring it up to the green drawing-room. And see our servants are made comfortable.’ He turned to Anne. ‘Everything will be in dust-sheets, I expect.’
The drawing-room was on the first floor, and Anne soon saw why he had chosen it. It had long French windows all along one side, beyond which a narrow balcony with a pierced-work rail looked over the tangled garden. The Count opened all the windows, and at once the fresh, green-scented air flooded in, driving away the mustiness. He stripped the Holland covers off some chairs and a table, and dragged them out on to the balcony, and then invited Anne to come out and sit down.
The sun had gone round enough for the balcony to be in the shade, and the view was glorious: beyond the overgrown garden, which sloped gently away downhill, the prospect opened up, and the whole of Moscow was spread out in the sunshine in a magnificent Oriental tangle of shapes and colours. Embraced by the long, low honey-coloured sweep of the city walls, the houses sprawled maroon and egg yellow, rose pink and holly green, interspersed with the blue spires and glinting golden cupolas of innumerable churches, and the brilliant white walls and blood-red roofs of the great palaces. The spaces between were filled with the dark, satisfying green of summer vegetation; the Moskva coiled in a silvery loop across the smiling land; and the whole was presided over by the red walls and multicoloured, spiralled and gold-tipped domes of the Kremlin.
They sat in silence for a while. Anne felt at peace, unhurried. All the things were there between them to be said, but it didn’t need to be yet; difficult things, many of them, but lying peacefully asleep in the corner of her mind – no need to disturb them now.
‘What a place!’ she said at last, softly. ‘I still find it hard sometimes to believe that I’m here.’
He grunted, seeing what she saw and what she remembered, side by side in astonishing contrast. ‘You are very much at home here now, by all accounts: Madame Tchaikovsky, they say, is the leader of the ton! Oh yes, even in Paris we get news of home – the gossip comes in the diplomatic bag! You’ve done well for yourself, Anna Petrovna – just as I always said you would.’
So he had heard of her since they last met. Somehow it disturbed her. She did not want him to approve of her hollow success, to applaud her sham of a victory. She wanted him to mind, but could not bear it if he did; and this was all too close to the difficult things that ought not yet to be disturbed. She sought for a neutral topic, one which would sufficiently engage them both. ‘Have you seen Caulaincourt?’ she asked. ‘You know he was recalled to Paris? Did he arrive before you left?’
‘Yes, indeed. I had a long talk with him on the day he arrived from Petersburg. He thinks his being replaced is an ominous sign – indeed, as I do – especially as his replacement is Jacques de Lauriston.’
‘I haven’t had a chance to meet him yet. I liked Caulaincourt very much. What is Lauriston like?’
‘Oh, he’s a good man – but you see it’s a military appointment, rather than a purely civilian one. Lauriston is a general, an experienced soldier. It’s all of a piece with Napoleon’s state of mind.’
‘So you think war is likely?’ Anne asked.
The relationship between Russia and France had been worsening steadily year by year, incident by incident. There had been that business over Napoleon’s second marriage, for instance. When Grand Duchess Catherine had refused him, Napoleon had offered instead for the Tsar’s younger sister Anna, who was just fifteen. By a clause in the previous Tsar’s will, the Empress-Dowager had been given final veto over the choice of husband for her daughters; and hating the Corsican Antichrist with an utterly Russian fervour, she refused absolutely to consider the match. The Tsar had hesitated to offend such a powerful ally, and after stalling for a number of weeks, finally told Napoleon that Anna was too young, and could not be married until she was eighteen.
Napoleon had then concluded a marriage treaty with the Emperor of Austria for his daughter Marie-Louise, but with a speed which suggested he had been carrying on negotiations all along, even while waiting for Alexander’s reply. This infuriated the Tsar, but also alarmed him. Russia and Austria were old rivals in the partition of Poland. The Tsar was always afraid that a closer relationship between France and Austria would result in an expansion of Austrian control over former Polish territories.