‘Ah, Barishnya, you have an old head on your young shoulders! Some people can look at a field and see only earth and stones, and maybe next winter’s hay. But you can look at a field and see Russia. Yes, it is there, and whatever comes, it will always be there for those who can see. Men bring evil into the world and breed it up for their sport the way they breed their hunting dogs. They change and spoil and destroy what is within their reach; but women go on, unchanging as the wind. Women go on, and Holy Russia goes on. God made it so.’
Her fingers stopped and were still. She was silent a moment, and then continued, holding Anne’s gaze intently. ‘The little one, Barishnya, she is another who sees more than is there.’
‘Natasha?’
Marya nodded. ‘Since she was born, I’ve watched her and wondered. She is not of us, Barishnya. She moves to a music we can’t hear. Sometimes I think–’ She paused to pursue a thought. ‘I lived in a house in Moscow once, where the beams and floorboards were made from an old ship’s timbers. When there was a storm at sea, the timbers used to creak and groan, even though the air around the house was quite still. The house was very old, and those timbers hadn’t been near the sea for a hundred years or more, but still they remembered. In their dreams they heard it sing, and they wanted to get back to it.’ The black old eyes were unfathomable. ‘The little one may walk away, one day. You should keep an eye on her, Barishnya. Don’t let her stray too far.’
The sun was westering as Anne walked back along the dusty track towards the house, with Nasha skipping ahead, and Sashka walking beside her, holding her hand and chattering in his happy way about the chickens and the oxen. Both children looked so normal and healthy and happy, it was hard to take old Marya’s warning seriously, or to believe that anything other than good could come to them. How rich I’ve become, she thought, with a home and a family, a future to look forward to, and this feeling of belonging. England seemed as far away as a dream; but her father was always near, his memory drawing substance from the unchanging earth, and all the things which, added together, meant home.
The house came into sight, and her steps quickened automatically. The family would have gathered on the terrace, she thought, for once the sun had gone round, it was shady and cool for most of its length; and the Count would be there, reclining on the day bed Vasky brought out for him from the small parlour. She walked round the side of the house with the children so as to approach by the terrace steps from the garden. Her eyes flew to him first in hope, and then her heart sank at the realisation that he was looking no better: in fact, his face was more drawn and pinched today than ever, and he lay back on the day bed in the flattened manner of one exhausted. He smiled as she appeared, but he did not speak or move, and his immobility was too complete to be natural.
Irina and Lolya were there too, still in their habits and talking about their ride. Lolya was sitting on the top step, and with her long hair in a plait hanging over one shoulder, was twiddling the end of it for the white stable cat, who was watching it with a lofty indifference belied by a certain tension in his posture.
‘And then when we came to the stream, I had to go round by the ford,’ Lolya was saying. ‘I do think I ought to have a proper lady’s horse of my own now, Papa. Poor Tigu simply can’t keep up with Iskra. Oh, here they are! Anna Petrovna, don’t you agree I ought to have a horse of my own? I mean, thirteen is nearly grown-up, isn’t it?’
As she looked away, the white cat struck at last with a massive paw and needle-claws half extended, and having speared the thick tuft of hair, curled his paw over sideways, revealing pads as pink as marmelad, and tried to draw it to his mouth.
‘I thought you loved Tigu,’ Anne temporised, her eyes on Nasha, who had run to her father and knelt beside the day bed to look passionately up into his face. With what seemed a disproportionate effort, he reached out his hand and stroked her hair briefly, and said, ‘Hello, my Mouse. What have you been doing?’ Nasha didn’t speak, but for answer pushed her head against his hand as a cat does, and settled herself with her elbows resting on the edge of the sofa so that she could continue to look at him.
‘Well, I do,’ Lolya said, ‘but now I’m thirteen I oughtn’t still to be riding a pony. Kira’s having a proper horse for her birthday. When I go to stay with Aunt Shoora next time, it will be hateful to have to ride a pony, when Kira has a horse.’
Vasky, alerted in some mysterious way to Anne’s arrival, appeared at the door of the parlour with the tea-tray, and Stefan came behind him carrying the samovar. Behind him, looking suspiciously from side to side as he emerged into the open air, as if he expected to be ambushed, came Adonis, the latest addition to the household. He was a soldier of fortune who had befriended the Count at the dressing station after the battle and had insisted on going with him whenever he was moved. When the Count had come home from Olita, Adonis had come with him, like a fierce and ill-favoured but unshakably loyal watch-dog.
‘But what is he to do, sir? What is his position to be?’ the despairing Vasky had asked his master on their arrival, while Adonis glowered from the corner of the hall, just out of earshot.
‘He will decide that for himself, I daresay,’ the Count had said with weary humour. ‘He seems to believe that I need him, and he will find some way to serve me. Make sure the other servants are polite to him, Vasky, and try to make him welcome. I owe him a great deal.’
Adonis’ appearance was not reassuring to a highly trained house servant. He was short and stocky, massively muscled about the shoulders and thighs, and with strong but surprisingly delicate hands with which he could do fine needlework as well as control a team of horses. His face was disfigured by a scar which ran slantwise across the left cheek and crossed the eye, which was white and blind. The eyebrow, too, had been cut almost in the middle, and the outer half grew wild and shaggy, while the inner part matched the smooth arch of the right brow. As Anne came to know him, she felt that his appearance in some strange way mirrored his nature. It was as if his inner self had been bisected by the wound, leaving him half-savage, half-civilised.
His name, she had assumed, was a joke.
‘It was like this,’ he told her later. ‘I come from Hungary, from a town called Puspokladonysz. When I first went a-soldiering, no one could pronounce my real name, so they called me by the name of my home town – just the end part, of course. In those days, I wasn’t so bad looking. Before I got this.’ And he touched his seamed cheek.
He had left home at a very early age to fight for anyone who would hire him. ‘There was nothing to do at home but work in the fields. I wanted to see the world and make my fortune. I’ve fought for the Turks and the Austrians and the French and the Prussians and the English. The Austrians paid best, and the Turks ate best, and the French had the most women, but the English were the best soldiers. I nearly went to England once, because they have such fine horses, but I didn’t want to be a servant. The English treat their horses like people, and their servants like animals.’
For one so alien-looking, Adonis had settled into the household very quickly, serving his master like a military body-servant, with a curious, touchy pride, which made him seem almost more like the Count’s friend than a domestic. He took an immediate liking to Anne and, with the slightest encouragement, would settle down beside her in the evenings with his piece of work and tell her his adventures. He was a natural storyteller, and many an evening she had sat spellbound, watching his hard, pointed fingers stitching delicate embroidery on a nightshirt for the Count, while he described desperate sorties, bloody battles, boar hunts and wild affairs with half-savage gypsy women. The latter stories, of course, were quite improper, but Anne took it as a compliment to her intelligence that Adonis did not feel inhibited from telling her them.