Yet for all his coldness and the lack of a welcoming smile, he had come to see her, when he need not; and in the very fact that he would not meet her eyes, she read a hint that there was something inside him which was not yet as hard as everything outside.
‘I’m glad you did – very glad,’ she said warmly, rising and offering her hand. ‘It’s good to see you again.’
He hesitated, but took her hand. His was very brown, and as hard as a plank, and he gripped hers briefly, then let it go.
‘Have you had breakfast? We’re shockingly late, as you see. Will you take something?’
His eyes surveyed her table briefly, and he said, ‘No, thank you.’ But she had seen their hastily suppressed glow of avidity, and thought that if they had been travelling at full speed from the Caucasus, they would have had little time for luxuries. Fresh wheaten bread, and cherry jam, and hot coffee probably had not featured much in his diet of late.
‘Oh do have something,’ she said lightly. ‘Giorgy, bring fresh covers for my guest – then you can help yourself, if you change your mind,’ she added to Sergei as the servant left. ‘Do sit down. It was such a surprise to see you last night.’
‘I was more surprised at seeing you. What brings you to Vilna?’ he said harshly.
‘My dear Sergei, everyone is at Vilna. The Emperor is here.’ she said. ‘How did you find out so soon where I lived?’
‘I asked one of the Quartermaster General’s staff. It’s typical of our army that there were no billets assigned to my men – in fact, I couldn’t find anyone who even knew we were coming; but the first person I asked knew where Madame Tchaikovsky was living.’ He gave a wry look. ‘Administration was always our weak spot. Monsieur Tchaikovsky is not here?’
Anne looked at him warily. Did he not know her circumstances? ‘No, he is in Moscow,’ she said. ‘May I make my daughter known to you? This is Marya Vassilievna; and Mile Parmoutier, her governess.’ Sergei nodded in their direction. His eyes engaged briefly with Parmoutier’s, but avoided Rose altogether, and Anne, always sensitive to her daughter’s feelings, bristled a little. But perhaps it was the fact of her being Basil’s child, rather than the leg braces and the white eye, she told herself sternly. She would offer him a second chance. ‘We always call Marya Vassilievna “Rose”, however. She’s learning to ride at the moment on a Cossack pony of phenomenal beauty and intelligence – isn’t that right, ma poupée? Rose nodded, her eyes going from her mother to the visitor warily. The old Sergei would have picked up the hint and entered into a discussion of the pony’s merits, which would have won Rose’s heart. All Russians seemed to love children, and Sergei had always had a particularly soft place for them in his heart. But the new Sergei merely nodded, cleared his throat, and looked away down the garden.
‘A pleasant situation you have here,’ he said. Rose’s face closed up, and Parmoutier jumped instantly to the defence of her charge.
‘I think, madame, if you will excuse us, we will go and get ready for our morning exercise,’ she said.
When they had gone, Anne did not speak for a while, but continued to study the averted face of her guest, who was still staring down the garden expressionlessly. She felt a little embarrassed, and a little awkward. She had nothing to say to this Sergei; and if he came only to sit in silence, why did he come at all? At last she said, ‘You arrived yesterday from the Caucasus I suppose? Had you travelled fast?’
He cleared his throat again, and flicked a glance at her. ‘Yes, we came without stopping. There’s a new regiment been raised – all volunteers – called the Pyatigorsk Cossacks, and I’ve been put in charge of a troop, and sent up here ahead of the rest of the regiment for special duties. Irregular cavalry, they call us.’
‘That sounds like a joke,’ Anne said. ‘From what I remember of the Cossacks, they’d be very irregular.’
He looked at her blankly. Oh Sergei, she thought, what happened to you?
‘You must have done well,’ she went on hastily, ‘to be singled out for such a command.’
‘Yes,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘I’ve a good reputation; and my men trust me. It counts for a lot out there, in the wild country. We depend on each other. There wasn’t one man in my troop who didn’t owe his life to someone else a dozen times over. This’, he touched the healing scar on his forehead, ‘was from a Persian javelin. One of my men saw it coming and pushed me out of the way just in time. I’d be dead if it weren’t for him.’
And that’s what you’ve filled yourself with, she thought; what you’ve put into the loneliness inside. The comradeship of soldiers, the warmth of the bivouac and the shared danger. ‘It must be a hard life,’ she said invitingly.
‘Yes,’ he said, and looked about him rather like a sleepwalker awakened. ‘Nothing like this. You can’t imagine.’
‘No, I can’t,’ she said. ‘What did you do with your free time, when you were off duty?’
‘There was never time to do much, except drink a bottle of wine in the mess, and play cards perhaps. When we had a few days off, we’d go to Tiflis, for the baths. Have you ever had a Georgian bath? No, I don’t suppose you would have. The baths in Tiflis are the best in the world. First the attendants rub you down with goat’s-hair gloves and soap, and knead and pummel you and rinse you off, and then you lie down on a towel and they walk up and down your back in their bare feet.’
Anne laughed incredulously, and he looked at her, showing the first sign of animation – of humanity – so far. He almost smiled.
‘It’s true! It’s the most exquisite feeling – I can’t tell you! All your joints and muscles click and crack and you can feel all the aches being massaged away. You feel wonderful afterwards – and then you go down into a sort of cave, where there’s a bath cut out of the mountain rock itself, and the hot mineral water pours into it constantly. And you just sit in that for as long as you like. There’s lots to do in Tiflis, but mostly we just go there for the baths. It’s worth the trip.’
He had grown almost expansive, tempting Anne to rashness. ‘And are the girls of Tiflis pretty?’ she asked.
He looked at her strangely. ‘I suppose so,’ he said, as though it had not occurred to him to look. Perhaps it hadn’t. It had been a stupid thing to say anyway, given what had been between them. She wanted to take it back, to apologise, but that would have been a worse mistake than the first. She could only try to build it into a commonplace.
‘Is there one more pretty than the others? Is there anyone special?’
‘I’m not interested in girls,’ he said, and suddenly looked directly into her eyes, for the first time as though he really saw her. ‘There was only one I ever cared for.’
Anne’s throat closed up. She sought for something neutral to say, but her wretched mind let her down. How would he interpret her silence? He was looking at her thoughtfully, and the corners of his mouth had softened, and she could not imagine where his thoughts might be. But when he spoke again, he said merely. ‘So my sister has come out at last? Were you there? Did you see her?’