He didn’t answer at once; and then he said, ‘I’m not sure. Look, across there, there’s something moving. Can you see it? I thought at first it was a deer, but now I think it looks like someone on horseback.’
Anne stared. ‘I don’t see what you mean.’
‘You see the whitish patch of rock, with the thorn trees above it? Well, just to the left, and below. No, it’s gone behind some bushes. There, now – it is a rider, isn’t it?’
‘It looks like it,’ Anne said. ‘But who could it be? Someone from Chastnaya?’
‘Too far away. And no one from there would ride alone.’ He paused, watching. ‘It must be one of the tribespeople – see how small he is? And he’s riding bareback, I think. But why is he on his own? The Tcherkess don’t ride alone on raids, and there’s no other reason for one of them to be here.’
‘He’s not alone,’ Anne said suddenly. ‘Look, higher up, against the skyline.’
Sergei breathed out. ‘Yes! Quite a party of them. What would you say – six? Ten?’ His hand drifted automatically towards his gun, and then he said, ‘I think we’d better get back home as quickly as possible, and alert the men. If they mean trouble, we had best be prepared.’
They turned their horses towards home. Nabat pricked his ears eagerly, and Quassy put in a dancing step or two, and both were only too willing to increase pace. Anne glanced back just before they passed out of sight. The party on the skyline were gone, but the small figure was still moving on the path below, picking a dogged way along what must have been a narrow and precipitous track. There was something naggingly familiar about the figure, she thought; and then smiled at herself for her absurdity. At that distance, it was impossible to recognise anything more than that it was a human on a horse.
They met Mishka on horseback about half a mile from the house. He waved and changed direction when he saw them, and galloped towards them, shouting something they couldn’t understand. Nabat and Quassy shied excitedly as he came up, circling his horse around them as he overshot.
‘Have you seen her?’ he shouted, hauling the reins of his sweating horse.
‘Seen who?’ Sergei asked. ‘We saw some Tcherkess on the ridge above the valley – looked like a raiding party.’
‘Natasha,’ Mishka replied automatically; and then, ‘What’s that? Tcherkess?’ He dragged his horse to a halt at last in a cloud of dust. Anne felt its grittiness in her mouth as she spoke.
‘Mishka, what are you saying? What about Natasha? Where is she?’
‘That’s what we don’t know. She’s gone. She took a horse and slipped away some time this morning. No one missed her until she didn’t come in for dinner – well, you know what she’s like, always doing things on her own. But then one of the serfs found a horse was missing from the stable, and one of the women came in from the fields to say she’d seen Nasha riding alone, and didn’t think it was right. We’ve got everyone out looking for her.’
Sergei and Anne exchanged a glance; Anne’s mouth flooded with the coppery taste of fear.
‘We’ve just seen her,’ Sergei said grimly. ‘On the valley side, going east. She was so far away, I didn’t recognise her – I thought she was one of the Tcherkess.’
Mishka’s face was pale, not only with dust. ‘But you just said you’d seen a raiding party.’
‘Yes, on the skyline above the path where Nasha was. About six or eight of them, I suppose.’
Mishka’s eyes were wide as he tried to assimilate the facts. ‘What were they doing? Had they seen her? Did they know she was there?’
‘They were just sitting there – watching her, I think,’ Sergei said, and his voice sounded like a sentence of death.
‘We must go after her,’ Mishka cried, turning his horse so sharply that it snorted and gave a half-rear.
‘Yes,’ Sergei said. His voice sharpened into an officer’s as he gave his orders. ‘Anna, go back to the house, tell them what you know, get Feodor to turn out an armed party, as many as he can, and send them after us. Mishka will come with me. We’ll go back to the valley and see if she’s still in sight. If she is, I’ll go after her and leave him somewhere to pass on the message. Do you understand? Then go!’
Anne made no argument, turning Quassy and kicking her into a canter even as Sergei finished speaking. A glance over her shoulder a moment later saw the two men already at some distance, galloping hard back towards the valley.
The women had the hardest part to bear. For the men there was at least activity to ease the ache of anxiety; but the women had nothing to do but wait. Nyanka alternated between wailing and prayers, beat her breast with a gnarled fist clenched about her wooden crucifix, offered God her life in exchange for Natasha’s. But behind this noisy and theatrical outcry, it was not hard to see the genuine, black fear in her eyes: not for the retribution she might expect if anything should happen to the child, but simply for Natasha herself. The child had been left in her charge: she should not have allowed her out of her sight; and if Nasha were not returned to them unharmed, Nyanka would never forgive herself.
It was not hard to discover how it had come about. At Chastnaya, the children enjoyed a greater degree of licence than in Petersburg, greater even that at Schwartzenturm. They were all well aware of the dangers of wandering too far from the house, and as long as they were somewhere nearby, everyone was happy enough to let them romp and play, and merely glance out at them from time to time to see that all was well.
Nyanka had had other things on her mind that day. Irina’s maid, Marie, had come storming into the kitchen quarters that morning complaining bitterly that a pair of her ladyship’s silk stockings was missing, and that someone must have stolen them. The Chastnaya servants had naturally resented the implication that there was a thief in their number, and counter-accused Marie of not knowing her own business. The Kirov servants rallied to Marie, and warfare had broken out, as all the frictions of the past weeks and the mixing of two households came to the surface.
Nyanka had tried to mediate, feeling herself to have loyalties on both sides – a Kirov servant, but Chastnaya bred. When Zina had come to find out what all the noise was about, Nyanka had tried to represent both sides of the argument fairly, and had her nose bitten off by Zina for her pains. She retired in high dudgeon to her sewing, and bid Tanya go and see if the children were all right.
Tanya, who had been given some mending to do which she did not believe was rightly her job, since the articles in question were the property of Danil’s children, and should therefore have been mended by a Chastnaya servant, flounced off to poke her head out on to the verandah. Sashka was there, playing with some wooden soldiers, and seeing some of the other children run past engaged in a game of hide-and-go-seek, she found it convenient to assume Nasha was of their number.
Thus it was that no one had noticed Nasha had gone until the children were called in for their dinner, by which time she had been gone several hours.
But gone where? And why? And why so far? To take a horse suggested some serious purpose. If she had wanted to go for a ride, there was no reason why she should not have asked for a pony to be saddled up for her. A groom would have gone with her then, of course; that she had taken a horse suggested she wanted to go somewhere she thought would be denied her.
But where? Sitting in silence on the verandah through that long, airless afternoon, the women racked their brains, trying desperately not to think of what might have happened to the little girl. It was not likely that any of the Tcherkess would lose the opportunity of capturing the fair-skinned, light-haired daughter of a Russian Dvorian. The best of them might simply return her in the hope of a reward – which they would undoubtedly receive. Others might kidnap her and hold her to ransom; and there were yet other possibilities too horrible to contemplate.