‘But just look at her. The evidence is there before your eyes.’
‘Those herbs couldn’t have made any difference. Don’t you think everyone would have known about them long ago, if they were good horse medicine?’
Anne turned to him with a smile. ‘I don’t know why you are so determined to be unkind to the Prince. He went to a lot of trouble to cure Quassy, out of the kindness of his heart.’
Sergei looked a little warm. ‘It wasn’t kindness, Anna Petrovna. Don’t you see that? He wanted to marry you – he said so himself. Or something worse.’
‘Nothing could be worse than being married to him,’ Anne laughed. ‘But all the same, he’s cured my poor Quassy, and I’m grateful.’
They turned away to go back to the house. ‘You realise, don’t you, that the difference is probably that the herd is out of range now? Since she can’t hear them or smell them, she’s not upset any more.’
‘Ungenerous! The Prince said she wouldn’t even be interested in the stallion.’
‘Yes, but she was evidently on heat before. Now she’s been mated, of course she wouldn’t be interested,’ Sergei said unguardedly.
It was the kind of thing that no one would have dreamed of saying to a young woman in England, least of all an unmarried woman; fortunately, the four years she had already spent in Russia enabled her to take such things in her stride.
Chapter Sixteen
They made an early start, while the air was cool and the dew still on the grass. Sergei had a packet of bread and meat and a bottle of wine packed into one saddlebag, a box of ammunition in the other, a blanket to sit on rolled behind the saddle, and his gun slung over his shoulder.
‘That should cover all eventualities,’ Anne remarked wryly.
Quassy was fresh, and curvetted about as Stefan flung her up into the saddle; but it was only her normal high spirits. She showed no sign of distress, or of wanting to be off after the herd.
‘All the same,’ Sergei said, ‘we’ll go the other way to begin with, up through the beech woods, to give her time to settle down.’
It was a beautiful day, clear with the promise of heat. The air was already spicy with thuja and juniper, and the smell of damp, crushed grass rose from under the horses’ quiet feet. In the distance the hills were lavender with shadow, and above them arched the dark-blue sky, decorated here and there with the little clouds of Russian summer – blinding white above and blue underneath.
They passed through the arable fields, where already the women were at work, bending between the rows of pale-green bean plants, their rumps broad with a multitude of petticoats. They straightened up as the two horses came by, resting their hands on their hips to ease their backs. A young woman with a red kerchief round her head was carrying a baby in a sling on her hip, and she waved its faf brown starfish of a hand at the dvoriane as they passed.
Anne was at peace with the world. How lucky I am, she thought, to have this perfect day before me, a beautiful horse to ride, a pleasant companion beside me, and all this glorious country to explore. Even the wistfulness, which is a quality of all happiness, was pleasant just then. She felt young, free, full of natural high spirits. She was twenty-seven years old, and in England she would have been considered already upon the shelf. She had never had the youthful pleasures that her birth ought to have entitled her to, the opportunities to enjoy her girlhood and secure herself a comfortable establishment; yet at a moment like this she could forget such things. She could forget that she was an orphan, a dependant, without security, without a home of her own, without love. For this one day she might have been ten years younger, in the first springing of youth, and riding beside a companion of her own rank, with a future of endless possibilities all before her. That was how life would have been for her, if her father had not died: today, she felt, had been given to her in compensation for what she had missed.
The beech woods were before them, lilac-shadowed in the early sun. The smooth, mysterious boles rose up like pillars in a cathedral to the canopy far above, where the leaves seemed almost transparent, quivering in the golden light. The feeling of tranquillity was so strong that the riders fell silent, and rode side by side almost without breathing. When they came out at the top of the woods, and the riant sunshine fell on them suddenly, they glanced at each other and smiled almost with relief.
Above the beech trees, the view opened out, a vista of green foothills rising to rocky heights, and in the distance the striding mountain chain, misty in the heat. There were skylarks high above them in the crystal air, and the sunshine fell so straight and clean and pure it seemed almost heatless.
‘Where is the house from here?’ Anne said some time later, when the windings of the path brought it to the edge of the hillside. They halted the horses to gaze out over the country; their shadows were short, now, and sharply black on the turf beneath them.
‘You can’t see it from here,’ Sergei said at last. ‘It’s over there, beyond that slope. You see where those trees are? Below that, under the flank of the hill.’
‘So far away?’ Anne was impressed. ‘I hadn’t thought we had come such a distance.’
‘It’s easy to lose track of where you are up in the hills. We’ve probably come thirty versts. It’s getting on for noon, you know.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Anne said. At once she began to feel hungry and thirsty. ‘I wish we’d brought some water with us, as well as wine,’ she said.
‘Bring water to a place like this? That’s like taking salt to the sea,’ Sergei laughed. ‘There’s water everywhere in the mountains – cleaner, sweeter water than anywhere down below. We’ll ride on a bit, and stop at the first stream we see.’
Round the next curve in the path, they came upon a crop of sunflowers growing in a sheltered pocket of land, between rocky outcrops like short, knobbed grey cliffs tufted with gorse bushes and stunted thorn trees. The sunflowers, which Anne had grown used to as a cottage-garden crop, looked fantastic in such profusion, and in this unexpected place: so tall, and with their round black faces and golden halos, like strange Nubian saints.
Suddenly Quassy stopped dead, quivering, her ears almost crossed with excitement. Sergei halted his horse too, his hand moving round automatically for his gun, and he searched for whatever it was that had alerted the mare. Then he put out a hand to Anne, and whispered urgently, ‘Anna! Look!’
She followed the direction of his pointing finger, and saw the brown plush coat and spreading antlers of a stag, basking amongst the sunflowers. They were downwind of him, and he hadn’t yet become aware of them. He leaned back, resting on his shoulder, his eyes half-closed with pleasure, his white throat a little stretched, like a contented cat, while above him the giant plants waved in the gentle breeze, passing their faint shadows back and forth across his red-brown coat.
‘Oh, lovely!’ Anne breathed; and then Quassy whickered her excitement, and in an instant the stag had sprung to his feet and leapt away over the side of the hill towards the beech woods, taking the steep slope in great heedless bounds.
‘What antlers! A pity I couldn’t get a shot at him,’ Sergei said.
‘You wouldn’t shoot such a lovely creature!’ Anne said reproachfully. ‘How could you?’
He looked at her sympathetically. ‘You’re too tender-hearted. We call the stag the Tsar of the Forest; but they do a great deal of damage to the crops, and they’re impossible to keep out even with fences. They eat and trample everything, and kill the fruit trees by chewing off the bark.’ Anne looked unconvinced, and he added, ‘Besides, you enjoy venison, don’t you?’