Half an hour later Quassy was driven by the press of bodies into the bottleneck, and trapped between the two sets of gates. Leaning over, Feodor caught the rope hanging from her headcollar, while Mishka reached over from the other side and attached a second rope; then the further gate was opened, and she exploded out of the trap, towing the two men with her. Anne watched in amazement as for the next few minutes, Quassy bucked and struggled like a mad thing to get away; then she seemed quite suddenly to resign herself to her fate, and stood quietly, though trembling all over from her head to her feet.
The two men examined her, ran their hands down her limbs, and pronounced her sound.
‘She’s very upset, though,’ Mishka said. ‘We’d best shut her in the stable for the rest of the day, let her get over it.’
Anne came towards her to try to stroke her, but she flinched away, staring over their heads with wild eyes, and when they led her forward, she went with them reluctantly, turning her head back and whinnying shrilly, as though calling to her recently acquired sisters for help. The men took her into a loosebox and released her, and she ran at once to the half-door and put her head out, staring into the distance and ignoring Anne’s attempts to stroke or pet her or give her sugar.
‘She’ll settle better if we shut the top door, too,’ Feodor said. When he had bolted the door at the top, he looked sympathetically at Anne and said, ‘Don’t worry, she’s not hurt.’
‘But she sounds so unhappy,’ Anne said. From within the loose-box came the rustling sound as she moved restlessly around in the straw, and the occasional angry thud as she tried kicking the door. Then, even harder to bear, a series of piercing neighs, as, shut up in the semi-darkness, deprived of her freedom and the excitement and the companionship she had tasted, Quassy called and called to the herd she could no longer see or smell.
Sergei hovered near, looking at Anne sympathetically. ‘She’ll forget all about it in a day or two,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Anne said, ‘but I wish she didn’t mind so much.’
‘You’ll have to be careful with her while the stallion’s nearby, or he’ll come and steal her back,’ Feodor said. ‘Best keep her shut in, until the herd’s back in the valley.’ With Sergei’s help, he urged Anne away from the box and out of earshot of Quassy’s piercing cries, back towards the corral.
‘By the way,’ he said suddenly, cocking his head at her quizzically, ‘have you thought what the result of this little adventure might be?’
Anne looked puzzled. ‘What do you mean?’
Feodor grinned. ‘Well, she was out with the herd for a whole day, and that’s a very eager young stallion. Ten to one he covered her in that time. Your Quassy may present you with a foal next spring!’
Chapter Fifteen
It was a day of hard work, filled with the sound and smell of horses, with dust, sweat, shouts, whinnies, and the soft drumming of unshod hooves. Anne’s mind was filled with a tessellation of images: a horse’s head flung up against the sky, nostrils wide; a foal determinedly suckling in the midst of turmoil; a man laughing, wiping a bloodied nose on the elbow of his coat; Zinochka in a red kerchief bringing out a jug of ale on her shoulder, the gold rings in her ears flashing in the sun; Mishka whirling a rope into blurring patterns around his head; Sergei astride the dozing Nabat, leaning back with a hand on the sun-warmed bay rump.
One by one the horses were driven through the bottleneck, and the ones that were to be sold at the fair were herded into a second paddock, while the others were released. None of those set free had any doubt as to where to go: they galloped as fast as they could lay foot to ground back towards the valley, where the stallion waited anxiously for them, keeping sentry on a prominent rock above the path that led to the pass.
The house-serfs meanwhile were making preparations for the evening’s amusements, digging a cookpit for the whole ox which was to be roasted, setting up lanterns and benches around the area marked out for dancing, labouring under Bablash’s caustic direction to prepare the feast which would accompany the ball. Other preparations were a grim reminder that here at Chastnaya they were on the very edge of the civilised world. Bars were fitted over all the windows of the house; the two elderly two-pounder guns mounted in front of the house, which Anne had thought merely for decoration, were loaded and primed and kept manned; and a guard of armed serfs was told off to patrol the house and the paddock, in case of raids in the night.
But the Kiriakovs did not allow the threat of danger to damp their enthusiasm for the pleasures of the evening which were to follow the labours of the day. As the sun began to go down, the men came back to the house, and there came sounds of tremendous scrubbings as they plunged their sun-reddened faces and dust-whitened hair into tubs of water, or submitted themselves to the chilly gush of the back-yard pump, with a grinning serf at the handle.
The sun sank, swollen and dark orange, and the spectacular display of gold and pink and purple that flushed the western sky went unobserved as the Kiriakovs sought out their finery, the billowing fragrance of clean linen, the tender whisper of silk, the gratifying weight of gold-thread embroidery. Perfume expanded upon warm skin; ears and wrists and necks were hung with gold and jewellery; heartbreaking little kid slippers, or soft boots of mellowed leather, were drawn on to eager feet; hair was brushed and curled and pomaded with as much care as if each head were a thoroughbred horse being groomed for exhibition.
The last rim of molten gold sank below the hills, and the mysterious twilight drifted silently in from the eastern sky. The servants lit the lamps on the verandah, and the vibrant blue air beyond the rails was alive with the flicker of bats and the soft madness of downy-winged moths; and the Kiriakovs began to assemble, drifting out one by one to sit or lounge, to gaze out into the dusk, to light the first cigar, to converse softly, in tentative phrases, as though their thoughts were assembling as imperceptibly as the twilight was stealing into darkness.
Mishka lay upon a hammock, one leg spilled carelessly over the side, and picked out a tune on the balalaika, in tenuous, almost disconnected notes; while Zinochka, her hair turned up and piled on top of her head for the first time, so that her slender neck was like a stem bearing some great top-heavy flower, sat on the verandah rail beside him and sang the words in a sweet, husky undertone. Feodor came out, lighting a cigar from a taper, his head bent over the glowing cave of his cupped hands, his profile and his fine Tartar nose illuminated suddenly like a religious painting. As he passed Zinochka he reached out a hand to touch her cheek fondly, and she turned her head and smiled – a wistful, almost a sad smile. She was in love for the first time, and could hardly bear herself, or the beauty of it.
Anne came out and walked to the end of the verandah, and stared out into the twilight. The air was as warm as milk on her skin, and filled with the intense fragrance of white jasmine and night-scented stock. Behind her were the sounds of softly clad feet moving on bare wooden boards, and the lilt of voices conversing quietly in Tartar Russian. A night-flying beetle, as big as a mouse, flew buzzing in like a clockwork toy to land on the verandah rail, folding its iridescent wing-cases with an audible click; and suddenly she became aware of how different it all was, how foreign to her. She thought of England, and for an instant it was close and dear, lying cool and green across her memory: her home, now lost to her. Her eyes filled with tears; foolishly she had not brought her handkerchief out with her; she turned blindly to go into the house, and found Sergei beside her.