I lay back down on the bed. I had no idea what time it was – outside, it was still dark as pitch and I felt no urge to light a candle. I wondered whether I would be able to return to sleep. As a young child, when I'd had a nightmare, my mother had sometimes let me sleep in her bed until morning. My father would not hear of such mollycoddling, so it was only when he was away that it was allowed. After he died, I grew up very quickly and so the need no longer arose. Even then I would fail to go back to sleep, but I would lie awake in terror in my own bed, like a man.
And now I was a man, and still I lay awake. I went over the dream again and again in my mind, trying to determine which specific element it was that had turned it into a nightmare, or to fall back to sleep in the attempt. It was something about the grapes that seemed most resonant with the sense of fearfulness that still lingered in me; something in the act of Domnikiia's offering them, of my taking them, although the prospect of my death from the poison held little apprehension for me.
I may have dozed as I lay there, yet I would swear that I was wide awake throughout; just as curled up in the safety of my mother's bed I had still never felt safe enough to slip back into the world of unconsciousness. The horror would always be ended by the sound of birds. As dawn broke, birdsong would hail the resurrection of the sun and the beginning of the new day. Time – which had stopped in the continual, unchanging darkness of the early hours, when there was no way of telling whether one's last thought had occurred a second ago or an hour ago – would begin again.
And so there in Moscow, the dawn chorus, which I still, as I had since childhood, associated both with being terrified and with the termination of that terror, eventually heralded the new day. Time began again and the night, and the nightmare, could be forgotten.
As rationality at last became fully resurgent in me I realized that a rational man should find much more to fear in that particular day than there had been in the night before it. That was the day that the French would enter Moscow.
It was well into the afternoon when the French finally arrived from the west, even as the last brigades of what remained of the Russian army scuttled away antipodally to the east. Amongst the last to leave, so the rumour-mongers would have it, had been Count Rostopchin, the city's governor. Fearful that the Russian mob would not let him depart, he had delivered to them a restaurateur by the name of Vereshchagin who was accused of being a French spy. The mob had torn Vereshchagin to pieces, while Rostopchin slipped away to freedom, unmolested. It was not the only time that I would find parallels between myself and Moscow's governor.
When they did arrive, the invaders were led not by Bonaparte, but by his brother-in-law, Marshal Murat, whom Bonaparte (ashamed, as any republican would be, of having a common soldier marry his sister) had elevated to the rank of King of Naples. Bonaparte himself was to follow Murat into the city the following day. I secreted myself among a small crowd of inquisitive Muscovites who witnessed Murat's arrival with more curiosity than fear or respect. Many thought that they were seeing Bonaparte himself, but I had seen enough pictures of the Little Corporal to know that this was not he. The flamboyant uniform and loose, curly, almost feminine hair were styles that Bonaparte would have abhorred, and left me in no doubt as to which one of France's marshals this was.
French troops spread in waves across the deserted city, showing little concern for the few Russians that remained. I was stopped occasionally, but there were far too few Russian speakers amongst them to accompany every platoon. When challenged I, like others I saw in the city, had merely to reply with a stream of suitably grovelling Russian babble and I was allowed on my way.
That day was a Monday, and our arranged meeting place for Mondays was Red Square itself. In more conventional times, it was an ideal location for a covert meeting, thronged as it was with crowds from which two or three figures in conversation would not stand out. Today, however, the crowds were crowds of French soldiery. To meet there would have been brave, and when carrying out acts of sabotage in an occupied city, bravery is not a quality that goes hand in hand with success.
I skirted around the square, returning three times that evening, but saw no sign of Vadim, or Dmitry, or of any of the Oprichniki.
I returned to the house that I'd been staying in only to discover that it was already a temporary barracks for a dozen or so French officers. Wisely, I had not left those few possessions I had inside. Climbing up to the roof, I found the small bundle I had hidden there, along with my sword, safe and intact. None of those inside heard me as I retrieved them. I headed further south and found somewhat less luxurious, but still serviceable accommodation, which the French had decided was beneath them. I was not the first man in history, nor would I be the last, forced to sleep in a stable.
The following day, there was little I could do but wander around the city. Food was still reasonably abundant, but at a price. Those Muscovites who had stayed behind may have had numerous reasons for doing so, but for some there was a profit to be made. An invading army could, of course, simply requisition every item of food, every bottle of vodka and any other victuals that they desired, but though they would get what they consumed for nothing, it would also be the last they would get. A moving army can pillage, but a resting army must trade. It must employ others to go out of the city and resupply what it requires. This, at least, was the conventional wisdom. I believed it and, to my best estimation, Bonaparte believed it too. As ever, we had both underestimated the resolution of the Russian peasant. A few fresh supplies found their way into the city, but precious little. The French – and their horses – in the end had to survive on what was already stocked up in cellars and storehouses. It would not be enough. Had the French realized this, their stay in Moscow might have been even shorter – and that might indeed have saved them, if they had left in time to get out of Russia ahead of winter. Not all of the French army did understand the need for trade, but the few remaining Moscow tradesmen supplied those who did as well as, conveniently, supplying me. I suspect that, had I chosen to disguise myself as a French officer while I stayed in Moscow, then I could have fed myself at half the price. There were few discounts offered to an abandoned Russian butler.
Compared with two days ago, Moscow was once again teeming with life. Bonaparte's army was, at this stage in his campaign, perhaps 100,000 strong – appallingly fewer than the number that he started out with, but enough to give the city some pale shadow of revivification. Still they were fewer than half the true population of the city, but they spent more time out on the streets than had the real Muscovites, who had homes to go to, so Moscow seemed busy, superficially.
I remember once, when fighting south of the Danube, I surveyed through my spyglass an abandoned battlefield, scattered with the corpses of both friend and foe. Suddenly, I had seen movement. A soldier, lying on his back, his face covered with blood, whom everyone had taken for dead, was moving his hand. It had been the slightest of motions, made through the terrible pain of his injuries, but the fact that he could confront that pain and vanquish it sufficiently to make that feeble signal showed how much he wanted to indicate that he was alive – how much he wanted to live.
The field had still been under Turkish fire, but I had dashed out, oblivious to the shouts of my commanding officer, bending low as if it might save me from enemy gunshot. I had to rescue that poor, injured man. I made it to where he was and threw myself to the ground. I could hear the whizzing of bullets around me, but I don't think that they were aimed at me. My first intention was to murmur some words of encouragement into the soldier's ear; to let him know that if he wanted to live, then I was there to help him. Then I had to find a way to drag his weak body across the vast expanse of land that separated us from our own lines.