Later, Anne went down to the morning room, and found the Count and Countess alone there, standing by the window and looking out into the street. They had the appearance of having been interrupted in a private conversation, and Anne hesitated at the threshold.
The Countess turned and held out a welcoming hand to Anne. ‘Yes, come in! I have something to tell you. Is the doctor still upstairs?’
‘No, madame, he left a few minutes ago. Did you want to see him?’ Anne said.
‘It doesn’t matter. I can send word after him,’ the Countess said. ‘I wish to consult him, although it is only to confirm what I already know.’ She smiled, and her face seemed alight and alive in a way Anne had not seen before. ‘Dear Anna, have you not guessed? You are to have a new pupil! There is to be a new addition to the nursery! I am with child again!’
Anne’s mind worked with feverish rapidity, assembling all the tiny pieces of evidence which she had failed to put together over the past week or so. She was desperately aware of the Count’s presence and kept her eyes forcibly from him, lest she betray herself. She remembered in a painful jumble of images the evening they had just shared, and the moments of intimacy which had seemed, then, so important to her.
Intimacy! She felt a withering sensation inside her, as she tried not to think of exactly what this news meant. It was a knowledge she had refused all along, shutting it away in some inaccessible part of her mind, even – inexcusable folly! – allowing herself to believe it was not so. Now the truth was being forced upon her. This woman was his wife. She was with child. He had shared a bed with her.
Anne heard her voice saying the right things, congratulating them both with amazing calmness, even with the appearance of pleasure. And now her treacherous eyes, despite all her efforts, escaped her control. The Count stood beside his wife, not quite touching her, and met Anne’s regard like a stranger. His face was a meaningless blank, his eyes opaque to her. For the first time since she had met him that day on the Île de la Cité almost a year ago, she looked at him and had no idea what he was thinking or feeling.
BOOK TWO
1807
Chapter Eleven
It snowed again that morning, the flakes falling with cat’s-paw softness on to the glittering, frozen city. Anne stood at her window and watched the endless, silent whirling from a sky the colour of a gull’s back, blotting out the view and making instead for her a magical, miniature landscape of drifts and hollows along the glazing bars of the window. It was March, still a month away from the thaw.
Ottepel – the thaw: an event so dramatic, so overwhelming, that Russian poets without number had used it as a simile for every kind of violent change from the emotional to the political. Anne had seen three of them since she came to Russia, as each year the revolving world turned back towards the sun, and the lengthening daylight hours began at last to warm the frozen northlands.
The first intimation would be the pink-tinged mist at dawn, and the long-absent sound of water dripping from the eaves and gutters. Then the ice on the Neva would suddenly split with a violent report like a cannon shot, and begin to break up. For a week, huge ice floes would move slowly downstream towards the Gulf, more and more of them, fed in from the ice-bound Lake Lagoda. They passed in endless procession like a migration of primordial beasts, magnificent in their heedlessness, grinding their shoulders against each other like rocks, jostling against the quays with a booming thud. The river, which all winter had been a road, and all summer would be a waterway, for a time was unusable. The banks were cut off from each other, except when some daring soul ventured out on to the ice and risked the crossing by jumping from one floe to the next.
As the ice melted, so would the snow in the streets. Underfoot it turned to treacherous slush, and galoshed boots replaced the felt valenki for those determined to walk. Sledges were put away, and the first wheeled vehicles churned the streets into grey-brown mires, flinging icy water over unlucky pedestrians. The dripping sound hastened into gurgling as the world threw off its winter-long accumulation of water: butts filled, gutters overflowed, and masses of softened snow slid suddenly and perilously from roofs. Everything was wet, cold and wet, and the air became a damp, grey blanket of fog through which the sun shone dimly, tracking across the sky a little higher each day.
And yet in the space of only two or three weeks, the whole thing was accomplished, and the blue-white, smooth and glittering world of winter would be gone, dislimning as completely as a dream. Suddenly there was colour again, the greens and browns of nature, the blue of cupola and the gold of spire; the sun shone, pallid but daily strengthening, from a vivid, spring-blue sky.
Then would come the day when the Peter and Paul Fortress at the mouth of the river fired its cannon as a signal that the river was open for navigation. As if conjured from nothing by the sound, hundreds of little boats, like gaily coloured insects, would instantly appear, filling the miracle of reflection between the banks. That first day, the tall, lovely buildings would echo with voices and laughter and music, as if the pent-up mirth of the city had been set loose to flow again, as the clear water bubbled up out of the unlocked earth like joy. Then the Governor of the Fortress would be rowed in a ceremonial barge, ornate and canopied as a Venetian gondola, to the quay in front of the Winter Palace, where he would present to the Tsar a glass of cold water as a symbol that the winter was truly over.
But that was all a month away at least, and, looking out on the smooth, unbroken integrity of the frozen world outside her window, Anne had her usual spasm of disbelief that this could be anything but the permanent order of things. While she had been standing there, deep in her reverie, the snow had stopped, and now the thermometer on the window-frame outside told her that it was freezing hard again. The sky was like stone, heavy with the threat of more snow to come, and her heart was numb, too, with apprehensions of disaster and the weariness of waiting for news. A month ago there had been a battle in snow-bound Lithuania between the French and the Russians. The Russians had claimed it as a victory; but the Count was missing.
It was odd to think, Anne reflected, that it had all started with the Duc d’Enghien, that handsome, auburn-haired Bourbon prince whom she had met briefly at the court at Karlsruhe. She remembered his gaiety, his lightness, the way the Princess had tapped his cheek affectionately with her fan, and could hardly believe that he had ever had anything more weighty on his mind than hunting, dancing and flirtations. But in February 1804, the French police had uncovered a plot to assassinate Bonaparte, one of many such since the Corsican had taken supreme power. It was secretly financed by the British government, and a leading figure in the conspiracy was said to be this same Duc d’Enghien.
It seemed that his role was to liaise between the emigrants in England and the Breton royalists who were fomenting the plot, and in particular to ride post-haste to Paris as soon as the Consul was dead, and proclaim the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Bonaparte evidently decided to make an example of the young Prince. In March 1804 he dispatched a force of three hundred dragoons secretly to Strasbourg. They crossed the Rhine in the dead of night, surrounded the castle of Ettenheim, dragged the Duc from his bed, and bundled him, protesting, into a coach, in which he was galloped under strict guard to Paris. There he was brought before a military tribunal, and summarily condemned for fomenting civil war. At two-thirty in the morning of the 21st of March, he was executed by firing-squad in the waterless moat of the fortress of Vincennes.