Anne could not listen to any more of this. ‘Children, why don’t you run on ahead of us? You needn’t go indoors yet. Ask Stefan to take you tobogganing in the garden. Tanya, go with them – and take Sashka in the sledge. I think he’s walked far enough.’ Lolya was happy enough to comply, but Nasha flung Anne a burning look of appeal. ‘Yes, I’ll come and see you later,’ Anne replied to it.
The children ran off, with Tanya following them pushing the sledge, and Anne was at liberty at last to turn to Basil and say, ‘For God’s sake, tell me! What do you know? Where is he? Is he hurt?’
‘He is safe. I’ll tell you everything I know, but take my arm, at least. You’re trembling. That’s better. Well, you know that there was a battle in Preuss-Eylau?’
‘Yes, yes, go on!’
‘It seems it was a pretty fierce affair, right in the town itself, a sort of running fight from house to house. Barclay de Tolly was commanding our men, but Soult’s soldiers gave them plenty of trouble at first, driving them back to the gardens at the edge of the town. It came on to snow, and our men were tired and half-starved, but Barclay rallied them and they fought their way back into the town square in the centre. Hundreds of French fell and even more were taken prisoner.’
‘But what of the Count?’ Anne asked desperately.
‘Hush, I’m coming to it,’ he said. ‘Well, the snow was blowing, making it hard to see anything, and dusk was falling, too, and the last of Soult’s men were holed up in the church and the graveyard, and making a stand there behind the snow mounds which had formed over the gravestones. Barclay sent in the cavalry to clear them out. Kirov was leading his own men in the charge when it seems he was hit by a round of grapeshot–’
‘Oh, dear God!’ Anne cried, her hands going up to her mouth.
‘Wait! Let me finish. He came off his horse and was probably knocked unconscious by the fall, or the shot, or something. His sergeant saw him go, but couldn’t stop, carried forward by the charge. All was confusion. You can imagine how it was darkness, driving snow, galloping horses. Kirov disappeared under the horses’ hooves – God knows why he wasn’t killed! He must have been rolled around like a stone in a whirlpool. Anyway, the charge was successful, and the French were completely knocked out, but when Kirov’s sergeant, who’d seen him fall, went back to help him, he couldn’t find him. He searched everywhere, and then reported him missing.’
‘And where was he?’
‘It seems some soldier from another troop, who didn’t know who he was, had found him and took him to a dressing station. The Count was unconscious at the time, of course, and when he came to himself, they discovered he’d lost his memory couldn’t remember his own name, or anything. So that’s why no report came through to us that he’d been found.’
‘What are his injuries?’ Anne managed to ask.
‘Well, he’d taken a lot of bruising from being under the horses, and one of them must have given him a kick in the head, for he had a head wound which was obviously what caused him to lose his memory. And his left arm was pretty badly knocked about.’
‘Have they – did they–’
‘Cut it off?’ He anticipated her with devastating ease. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. The message says it’s pretty bad, that’s all.’
‘And does he still remember nothing?’
‘Oh, as to that, he’s quite himself now. What happened was that they moved him from the dressing station almost at once to a hospital camp at Konigsberg, which is why no one from his own troop could find him. And from there, they took him by sledge to military headquarters at Olita. That’s where he was when his mind cleared, and he remembered who he was and what had happened. So they sent off a message, and it came through in the despatch bag to Czartoryski’s office today. And that’s all 1 know.’
There was a brief silence while Anne digested the story, and then she said, ‘Thank you for telling me. I could not have endured to wait until we reached the Palace. But you will have to tell it all over again to the Countess.’
‘Of course,’ Basil said simply. ‘I wonder how she will receive it. It will be as well for you to be on hand, in case she faints away, or something. All women have not your spirit, Anna Petrovna.’
Anne hardly heard him. ‘It is intolerable to know so little! There must be a way to find out more.’
‘Well, of course, now we know where he is, we can send for news. But whether it will arrive before the thaw, there’s no knowing.’
‘But you will do everything you can to hasten any news to us – to the Countess?’ she amended hastily.
‘I will come to you daily,’ he promised, ‘even if it is only to tell you that there is no news. But try not to worry. If there were apprehensions about his life, they would surely have said so.’
‘You think so?’ Anne mused. ‘Yes, perhaps you’re right. And perhaps, now he has been wounded, they will send him home after the thaw.’ She imagined the summer at Schwartzenturm with him, with a wound only just bad enough to stop him going off on business all the time. She imagined driving him about the estate in the caliche, helping him to get to know Sashka, walking with him on the terrace after dinner. She sighed. ‘We must go and tell Irina Pavlovna,’ she said, and they resumed walking towards the Palace.
Chapter Twelve
It was a beautiful, clear May day. Lolya had gone riding with her mother, and Anne was walking back from a visit to Marya Petrovna with the two younger children. Sashka had fed the chickens from his hand, and smiled in delight as the old red hen’s single chick came running with a shrill tseep-tseep and thrust its little clown bill between his fingers for the grains of meal. Nasha was trying to teach tricks to the latest pig, whom she had named ‘Pushka’ – cannon – because he was black and barrel-bodied. She said he had learned his name already, and certainly he came to her when she called, but Anne thought secretly that it was rather because all animals loved Nasha and came to her whether she called or not.
After a while, when the children had run off to the red stables to feed the white oxen with sugar, Marya Petrovna, her fingers flashing back and forth in her lap amongst the lace-bobbins as if they had a separate life from hers, had told Anne the village news: of marriages arranged and deaths anticipated; of new friendships and old jealousies; of a lame horse and a twin calving; how Zina Andreyevna had prayed to St Anthony, and the very next day had found the ring she had lost; how wicked old Nikita, who had barely drawn a sober breath since last harvest, had sworn to the Pop – the parish priest – that the reason he had not come to Mass last Sunday was that he had seen Our Lady in a vision and had been too overcome to stir out of his bed.
Anne listened with interest and a sense of peace, which always came to her in the presence of this old lady. The little village concerns – small, unimportant, universal – stroked her mind into the same kind of blissful calm that Nasha induced in Pushka by scratching his back with the rounded end of a bodkin. Beyond the borders of Russia, armies marched and counter-marched, battles were fought, men cried out and suffered and died; but here, in the heart of this great country, the fields bore no treading foot but the farmer’s and the oxen’s, and the hills echoed only to the whistle of a man to his dog, and the clamour of rooks going home at dusk.
She had tried to explain this to Marya Petrovna, but her Russian was not yet good enough to express so nebulous and complex a thought. But old Marya had nodded as though she understood, and her snake-dark eyes had looked long into Anne’s.