‘Just a flank movement on the old road. Action’s broken off everywhere else – the French have fallen back.’ Nikolai’s eyes went ahead of him, searching for their punishment. ‘When I got back to headquarters there was a message from your prince, about Sergei. I didn’t know you were still here.’
‘I couldn’t leave,’ she said. ‘Is the battle won?’
Through the door, his hold breaking away from her. ‘God knows. Our losses are heavy.’ His eyes found the shape in the bed. ‘How is he?’
She didn’t know how to tell him, but she didn’t need to. When she didn’t speak, he turned abruptly and read her face, and his mouth turned down bitterly. He went to the bedside and took the seat Anne had vacated, reached over for his son’s hand. ‘Sergei,’ he said. ‘It’s me, it’s Papa. Seryosha, look at me.’
Sergei muttered and turned his head. Please, Anne prayed inside her mind, please let him wake, let him know him…
‘Seryosha, it’s Papa. Can you hear me?’
Sergei opened his eyes, frowning. He licked his lips, and then yawned again. ‘Cold,’ he muttered.
Nikolai leaned closer. Tears left clean tracks down his smoke-grimed face. ‘I love you,’ he said; stroked the hair from the marble brow and kissed it. ‘Forgive me, Seryosha. Say you understand.’
But Sergei’s eyes were wandering. Anne could see he did not recognise his father.
‘Don’t forget the horses,’ he muttered. He turned his head away, staring towards the window, held apart in the loneliness of dying. An expression of great bitterness crossed his face, as if he had suddenly seen everything with great clarity, the whole futility and waste of it, the life he had been robbed of. Anne, watching him, did not see the moment when he went. Only she became aware that the look of bitterness had faded little by little, as the light fades gradually out of the sky after the sun has gone; and suddenly from being twilight it is night, without there being one particular moment when one could say the transition occurred.
Chapter Thirty
Some time after midnight, Adonis arrived at the house, and was admitted by Stenka, who showed him silently into the drawing-room. Adonis took in the scene with one comprehensive glance; the body on the bed, covered with a burka; the old woman asleep in the chair beside it; and Anne and Nikolai on the day bed near the window, she seated, he lying down with his head in her lap.
Anne’s eyes, red-rimmed but sleepless, met his blankly over the Count’s head.
‘He’s sleeping,’ she said.
Adonis looked grim. ‘We’re pulling out. You’ll have to go too. It won’t be safe here. You’ll have to wake him.’
But he was stirring already. He woke from the dead sleep of utter exhaustion and looked up blankly at Anne for a moment, and she longed, helplessly, to give him a little longer in blessed oblivion.
‘Adonis is here,’ she said gently.
He blinked, and then groaned and pulled himself upright. That waking, he thought afterwards, was the worst of his life. He was more tired than he had thought it possible to be. Every bone in his body ached; his eyes were gritty in their sockets, his mouth was dry and foul-tasting, his head ached; but worse than all of that was the dead weight of grief that rolled on to his chest like a stone, as memory returned.
‘Adonis,’ he said thickly. ‘What’s happening?’
‘New instructions, Colonel,’ he said neutrally. ‘The Prince-General ordered us to regroup, to renew the battle at dawn, but when they counted up our losses, he changed his mind. We’re withdrawing past Mozhaisk. The artillery’s on the move already – infantry to move off at two o’clock. Cossacks to provide a rearguard and cover our retreat.’
The succinct report cleared the fog from Kirov’s head. ‘What were our losses?’
‘Forty thousand, by the first reckoning – dead and wounded.’ In the silence, Kirov heard Anne’s indrawn breath of disbelief. The number was past comprehension.
‘And the French?’ he asked.
Adonis shrugged. ‘As many, I’d say. They pulled back, out of sight of the battlefield, but by the numbers of the dead, it must be as many.’ Kirov nodded, and then put his head into his hands to rub his temples. Adonis eyed him with sympathy. ‘Orders, Colonel? You’re wanted pretty badly at headquarters.’ Kirov looked up sharply. ‘I must bury my son. Then I’ll leave. I must bury him first. The General will understand that. As soon as it gets light…’
Adonis was not a Russian, and looked as though he would like to argue; but he held his tongue. Even on the march, with the French on their tails, the soldiers had continually stopped to bury their dead, leaving a shallow mound and a hastily knocked-together wooden cross over each. He couldn’t expect his master to do less for his own son.
In the grey light of dawn, they set off down the track, turning on to the road that led past the ruins of Novoye Syelo to join the main road just beyond Gorky. Anne had left Stenka and Zina with warm thanks for their loyalty and help, and promised them a more tangible reward when the troubles were over. They accepted her thanks stolidly, and stood silently in the yard to see her off, looking as though they had grown up out of the cobbles: permanent, enduring.
Anne and Pauline climbed into the carriage; Nikolai and Adonis mounted their horses. Behind the courtyard, in the strip of rough grass between the house and the tree line, there was a newly formed mound of brown earth. Kirov looked back at it as they rode out of the gate. They had buried Sergei in the ground, wrapped in the burka: they had no coffin for him. Stenka had promised to cover the mound with stones, to keep the winter wolves from digging it up.
As the sun began to rise, the battlefield below was revealed in all its horror, a desert of fallen men and horses, thousands dead, thousands still suffering, moaning in their mortal pain. Scattered amongst them were broken lances, shattered breastplates and helmets, shell fragments, splintered gun carriages. Around the fortifications, now battered almost level, the bodies lay in heaps like discarded rags, mute witness of the many times the defences had changed hands in the course of the battle. In the stream gullies, where the wounded had instinctively dragged themselves to be out of the firing, they were tangled and heaped, living and dead together; the wounded drowning in their own blood, crying pitifully for help, or at least for a bullet to end their misery.
The road towards Moscow was packed with the retreating army, marching wearily, but in good order. Six miles distant, the town of Mozhaisk was already filled with wounded, who had managed to drag themselves thus far, hoping for transportation to Moscow and hospital treatment. Here a young white-faced subaltern met them with obvious relief, to say that Kirov was wanted urgently, and Colonel Toll was looking for him.
‘Wait one moment,’ Kirov told the boy, and dismounting, walked stiffly up to the carriage window. He reached up and clasped Anne’s hand. ‘Go on to Moscow as fast as you can. Don’t stop for anyone, or you may find your carriage stolen from you. When you get there, you had better hide the horses. We’ve already asked Rostopchin several times for horses to transport the wounded, and anything that moves in Moscow will have been requisitioned or stolen by now.’
‘Yes. I understand.’ She felt keenly his ability in the midst of everything to feel such minute concern for her.