‘Yes, until December,’ he was saying. ‘Then he went to Paris, and I went to Lvov. Provincials! How I hated that! And then to Kiev, which I liked very well; and now here. Have you heard from Papa? He is lucky, to be sent to Paris again. How I long to see Paris!’
‘I think he would sooner be here,’ Anne said, ‘and let you go to Paris in his stead.’
‘Do you think so, indeed?’ Sergei said seriously. ‘I wonder. He loves his work, you know. He told me when we were together at Tilsit that diplomacy is in his blood. I think he soon grows bored with sitting at home and riding about his estate, with nothing to do in the evening but talk to his–’ He broke off, and blushed a little, and Anne affected not to notice what she imagined was to be a disparaging remark about Irina.
‘Was he in good health when you saw him last? His letters never mention such things. Does his arm trouble him?’
‘He says it aches a little in cold weather, but otherwise it seems to hold up very well. He told me,’ he added in a burst of confidentiality, ‘about your standing by him, when the surgeon searched the wound. I must say, Anna Petrovna, you are very brave, and a good friend to Papa. I know he thinks very highly of you – and I do too. And,’ he added, looking closely at her, ‘if you won’t think me impertinent, I’ll say you are looking very handsome today.’
Anne laughed. ‘I shall think you not only impertinent, but very foolish! Handsome, indeed, in this gown, and with my hair undressed!’
‘Well, I’m sorry, but it seems so to me,’ he said, seeming more puzzled than rebuked. ‘Perhaps–’
‘Ah, here is Yurka with some tea for us,’ Anne said with relief. ‘Or would you rather have something else?’
‘Tea will do very well. Papa told me how you preside over the samovar at home, in my mother’s place. I shall like to see how you do it.’
‘You are determined to put me out of countenance, but I shall not give you the satisfaction,’ Anne said, laughing. ‘Now do tell me what has been happening to you. What did you do in Kiev? I know very little about it, except that there is a fine cathedral there. Did you see it? Tell me all about it.’
By skilful questioning, she persuaded Sergei to drop the subject of her looks and character, and to talk instead of his own experiences. If he had been anyone other than her employer’s son, she would have thought him trying to flirt with her, or at least finding her attractive; but she was eight years his senior, and her position within the family alone should have made her invisible to him as a woman. Yet she was a little put out to find how attractive he had grown, and even more so to find herself noticing it when she was with him.
Zina’s slight coolness towards Sergei was not echoed in the greeting of any of the rest of the family, and soon wore off in the face of his personal charm and the family’s tradition of hospitality. Even Irina seemed less reserved with him than on former occasions, and she questioned him eagerly about his father, without seeming shy of him. Anne thought he still was not at ease with her, but he greeted his half-brother and half-sister affectionately. Nasha, in particular, seemed pleased to see him, and wound herself briefly but fervently round his waist.
He came evidently prepared to stay, and after dinner revealed that he had been given a month’s leave, which he thought not long enough to go even as far as the Black Sea. Feodor said at once, ‘Then you must stay here; of course you must stay with us!’ and so it was settled. As the family accepted him so easily into their number, so also they treated him as one of them, without troubling themselves to entertain him. Before long, Anne found he was attaching himself to her as being the one person who would interest herself in his feelings and enterprises. If she sat down on the verandah with a book or a piece of work, he would drift up and sit beside her; if she changed into her riding-skirt to take Quassy out, he was sure to appear at her elbow and offer her his escort; and after a day or two, she stopped struggling against the inevitable, and accepted that whatever she did, he would be her shadow.
She found herself enjoying his company more than she had expected. She tended always to think of him as the child he had been when she first came to Russia, but he had grown up so much in the last year or so that the difference in their ages was less obtrusive than before, and his experiences since he had graduated from the academy and left the stifling folds of his grandmother’s care had made him enormously better worth conversing with.
On the first day that they took a long ride together, he told her the extraordinary story of what had happened at Tilsit. After the defeat of Friedland, the Tsar’s brother Constantine, along with other senior generals, argued that to continue the war was like holding a loaded pistol to the head of each Russian soldier. The war was in any case being fought for no vital Russian interest, and to drag the weakened and demoralised army into another confrontation with the highly trained French would simply be to court another defeat, which might bring Napoleon to the very gates of Russia itself.
Besides that, the war was unpopular at home; and the peasants, on whom it fell to provide the manpower, detested the compulsory military service, and there had been outbreaks of violence and arson in protest against it. Galling though it was to deal with an upstart general whom the Synod of the Russian church had stigmatised as ‘the raving foe of mankind’, common sense dictated that it was necessary to make peace.
‘Papa said that Napoleon had never wanted to fight us; that he had always looked on France and Russia as natural allies,’ Sergei said as he rode his horse casually one-handed alongside Quassy. ‘He said that Napoleon had made overtures to our Emperor before, but that the Tsar would have nothing to do with it; and it was very hard, even though the Tsar agreed we must make peace, to get him to meet Napoleon at all. Especially, it was hard to find a place to hold the meeting. Napoleon has his pride, too, so it had to be on neutral ground.’
‘And hence the raft on the river?’ Anne prompted.
Sergei laughed. ‘Oh, you heard about that? Well, of course you would have! It was so fantastic, we all thought from time to time that we must be dreaming! Only it wasn’t a raft, you know, but a barge.’
‘But how did it come about?’ Anne asked.
‘It was Papa’s idea,’ Sergei said with evident pride. ‘Every place we suggested, the French objected to, and vice versa, and in the end Papa said, why not meet in the middle of the river? Because the Nieman is the boundary, Russia on one side and Prussia on the other. He swore afterwards that he said it as a joke, but you know Papa – he always means more than you think when he says things.’
‘Yes, I’ve noticed that,’ Anne said.
Sergei nodded. ‘Well, whether he meant it or not, the idea seemed to take, so we had a barge built, and towed it out into the middle of the river and moored it with ropes to the central piles of what had been the bridge, before it was destroyed. Then we had a tent made, with N for Napoleon on one side and A for Alexander on the other – oh, you’d have laughed, Anna! – and the two Emperors were rowed out there, and sat in the tent on either side of a table and talked.’
A quail got up from the grass beside the path, and his horse startled, and he took a moment to quiet it. ‘But after the first two days,’ he went on, ‘everyone said it was too cramped on the barge, so it was decided that Tilsit itself should be declared neutral territory, and the rest of the talks took place there. But the barge was a good idea. I don’t see how we’d ever have got the Emperor to sit down in the same room with Napoleon if it hadn’t been for that.’