A voice rose. ‘Stand aside, damn you! That’s an order!’ Anne looked up at Nikolai, her eyes widening in distress. It was Sergei’s voice. The Count read her thoughts easily, and shook his head.
‘He wouldn’t come here just to upset you, Annushka. It must be something important. Wait here.’
He strode away to the wicket, calling to the guard softly as he went, ‘All right, Private, I know this man.’
‘I beg your pardon, sir, but my orders was to let nobody past,’ the man defended himself, politely but stoutly.
Anne saw Sergei come to attention in the moonlight, which made dark holes of his eyes, and then step aside with his father out of earshot of the guard. Anne could hear nothing of what they said, but she was aware of her heart beating uncomfortably fast, as if it knew of some danger of which she was unaware. At last she heard Nikolai say formally, ‘Very well, Captain. Return to your men, and say nothing to anyone.’ Sergei saluted and was gone, and Nikolai was coming back to her.
She knew what it was before he spoke. He took her hands, and his were cold, despite the warmth of the night, and damp. Her blood seemed to stop and stand still; everything seemed to become very quiet.
‘Sergei was out scouting with his troop near Kovno, on the Nieman. The French have built three pontoon bridges across the river, and they started crossing a few hours ago. It has begun.’ She could think of nothing to say. He turned abruptly. ‘I must go to the Emperor,’ he said, but before he had gone two steps, there was Balashov, apparently on his way to find out what had been happening at the wicket. In a few words Kirov told him what he had told Anne.
Balashov’s grave face, the unrevealing face necessary for a minister of police, did not change. ‘Very well. I’ll tell His Majesty. Go and find Tolly, will you, and tell him?’
The two men went different ways, leaving Anne beached and forgotten. She stood where she was, not knowing what to do with herself, or with the picture that had been planted in her mind. She saw a broad river, silver in the moonlight; three black pontoons spanning it; and over the pontoons, like an army of ants, the close-packed columns, more and more and more of them, more than could be counted; dark except for the white flash of their leggings, and the pin pricks of moonlight glinting from the tips of their bayonets. Thousand upon thousand, pouring into Russia with the pitilessness of insects, swarming over the bridges, marching towards Vilna…
With a distant part of her attention, she saw Balashov walk up to the Emperor, murmur a few words in his ear. The Emperor nodded, and then turned away and carried on chatting to the elderly lady beside him. Perhaps it had all been a dream, Anne thought. Perhaps Sergei had not really been there at all. She tried to walk forward, but her feet seemed rooted to the ground. Definitely a dream, then. She looked down at them, and they seemed a very long way away. The pale green satin of her slippers was darkened by the dew from the longer grass of the river bank; she noticed the exact shape of the mark, and it seemed somehow important to remember it.
Then Nikolai was beside her again, his hand gripping her forearm to hold her attention.
‘Anna, listen! The Emperor’s leaving, and I have to go with him; but he doesn’t want anyone to know the news yet. He wants the ball to go on. I can’t take you with me – you’ll have to stay for a while. But in half an hour’s time you can have a headache, excuse yourself to Madame Bennigsen, and go home. Go straight home, and tomorrow morning, begin packing. I’ll come to you when I can.’
She desperately wanted some kind of reassurance, but she knew she mustn’t delay him: he now had far more important things on his mind than her. She bit back the useless questions that jumped into her mouth, and said, ‘Yes, I understand.’
He was already turning away, but with the last unconsumed fraction of his attention, he recognised her effort, and paused to catch her chin and deliver one hard but loving kiss. ‘Good girl,’ he said. And then he was gone.
The day seemed endless. During the morning the bright skies clouded over, and by noon they had drawn down in a dark blanket over the whole sky. There’s going to be a storm, Anne thought, pausing in the act of folding a gown to look out of the window. The air was oppressive, like a damp hand muffling everything, making it hard to breathe; and in the back of her mind, the ant-soldiers marched, marched, their white legs swinging all together in a rippling row, left right left right, tramping down the road from Kovno. How long would it take for them to reach Vilna? How far was it? Fifty – sixty miles? The clouds were black and purple now, and the daylight was strange and muted. It was like a dreadful omen – but for whom? For them or for the French?
A light scraping and thumping sound made her turn, and there was Rose, walking with Mile Parmoutier supporting her from behind, her face screwed up with concentration, the tip of her tongue protruding from between her teeth. Anne held out her arms, and Rose came to her, and exchanged her governess’s hands for her mother’s waist. They looked out of the window together.
‘Maman, why is it dark?’ she asked.
‘There’s going to be a storm, chérie, that’s all. Thunder and lightning. Nothing to be afraid of.’
Rose considered the answer, looking up at her mother. The crooked eye seemed a little less crooked of late, and quite a lot of the iris was showing. Anne smoothed the soft fawn hair away from the bony forehead and tried to smile.
‘But you’re afraid,’ Rose observed, her one eye searching.
‘A little,’ Anne admitted. ‘But it’s silly to be afraid. Storms can’t hurt you.’
‘Giorgy says the French are coming,’ she said bluntly. ‘He’s afraid of them. Will we have to go away?’
‘Yes, I think so.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Will the French kill us?’
The question, so innocently spoken, exposing the root of Anne’s fears, made her wince. ‘No, darling. We’ll be gone before they get here.’
Rose came now to the heart of her own anxiety. She tugged at Anne’s waist with the urgency of it. ‘Will we take Mielka?’ Anne laughed shakily, and hugged her daughter briefly. ‘Oh, darling, of course we will! Mielka will go everywhere with us. We wouldn’t leave him behind.’
Rose’s smile became radiant, and she was content then to resume looking out of the window. There was lightning now, flickering greenish against the indigo clouds. Parmoutier came and stood beside Anne too, and they watched and waited in silence. Suddenly the air was stirred by a breath of cold wind, just as if a damp blanket had been lifted, and the governess shivered and said, ‘Here it comes!’
A second later there was a flash of lightning followed instantly by a tremendous crash of thunder, so loud that it made them all jump, and Anne bit her tongue. Another cold breath, and a few heavy drops fell on the step of the verandah, leaving dark circles in the pale dust; and then the rain came down. It fell in an almost solid sheet, hissing on the dry earth and blotting out the distance. The trees shifted and whispered, and the smell of rain came in through the open windows to the waiting women, green, refreshing, delicious.
An old woman, one of the locally hired servants, came shuffling in to push past them without ceremony and close the windows. The sound of the rain diminished; the stale warmth of the room closed round them, cutting them off from the drenched garden outside, where the lightning still flickered and flashed.
‘Standing by an open window!’ the old woman grumbled. ‘Catch your death, Barina, and the little one too! Well, this’ll teach that Napoleon to come crossing our borders. His men’ll be drowning in it, and I hope he drowns too. Good riddance to him! Let me get to the other window, Barina, before that carpet gets soaked.’