The Count, for his own reasons as well as for Anne’s safety, wanted to travel as fast as possible, so they stayed nowhere for more than a single night, and during the day they stopped only to change horses. They would enter the coach at eight in the morning, and travel until five or six in the evening, when they would descend stiffly at the chosen post-house to bathe, dine, and retire to bed. The unvarying routine soon produced in Anne a feeling of unreality, as though she were trapped in a repeating dream. Day after day they jolted along through flat fields and acres of young crops, through endless stretches of dark coniferous forest, through winding river-valleys where mild-eyed cattle grazed; past rolling green hills or distant mountains, past reedy marshes loud with birds, bare bog-heath, and silent, glassy lakes.
The days blurred into one another in her memory, until she felt that this was all she had ever done, and the names of the towns they passed through merged in her mind, so that she no longer knew with any certainty where they had been.
The early part of the journey produced one memorable incident. Having travelled through France, they crossed the Rhine by the bridge at Strasbourg and drove along beside the river to Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden. Here Count Kirov stopped and made a formal visit to the court to pay his respects to the Princess Amelie, who, he explained to Anne, was the mother of the present Empress Elisabeth of Russia.
The Princess received Anne with great kindness, and the Count most eagerly, taking him aside for a rapid conversation in German about the state of international affairs. She had with her a handsome, beak-nosed, auburn-haired man of about the Count’s age, who greeted Kirov with a broad smile and an embrace as an old friend. This was Louis-Antoine de Condé-Bourbon, known as the Due d’Enghien. He was the sole surviving grandson of the Prince de Condé, exiled from France and formerly known as an intriguer on behalf of the Bourbon family against the various Revolutionary governments of France. He now lived a life of bachelor retirement in the nearby palace of Ettenheim, and was a frequent visitor to the court at Karlsruhe.
He and Kirov had met in Italy some years earlier, when the Duc was serving with the army under the Russian general Suvorov, and Kirov was commanding a cavalry troop. As well as being very handsome, the Duc was high-spirited and charming, and Anne was not surprised to see he was a great favourite with the Princess, who often pinched his cheek or tapped his hand affectionately with her fan while laughing at the things he said.
When Kirov had passed on the news, the Princess pressed him to have dinner with her and the Duc, and to remain at the palace for a few days, courteously including Anne in the invitation. The idea of dining with royalty and staying in a palace was both dazzling and terrifying. Anne immediately began a mental review of her wardrobe, and did not know whether to be pleased or disappointed when the Count made his apologies, and said that he was anxious to press on with the journey. The Princess did not press him further, saying she knew what it was to be far away from those one loved. She entrusted him with letters for her daughter at St Petersburg, and bid him a kind farewell.
After Karlsruhe they travelled on through Wurzburg, Bayreuth and Freiberg to Dresden, which they reached ten days after leaving Paris. It was here that they heard the news that England had declared war on France by seizing two French merchant ships on the 18th of May, and had already sent a squadron to blockade Brest. Bonaparte had retaliated by ordering every European port closed to English shipping, and by arresting all English travellers in France – some said as many as ten thousand had been taken up. Part of Anne had never really believed that the Consul would do such a thing, and the reality of it brought home to her forcibly how much she owed the Count.
‘So it all begins again,’ the Count said to Anne that evening at the supper table in the posting inn, which stood at the end of the splendid, many-arched bridge which spanned the Elbe. ‘The privations and the killing and the suspicion – all the waste and madness of war.’
The innkeeper came in bringing a dish of veal cutlets accompanied by pickled red cabbage, strong-smelling sausage, and the inevitable round of stringy cold beef. He was very voluble on the subject of the war. The talk, he said, was that the First Consul had sworn he would conquer England and utterly destroy the faithless, treacherous islanders. Anne had been very quiet since he had gone out again. ‘You must not mind too much what that man says,’ the Count went on, eyeing her sympathetically. ‘It is a thing that is bound to be said.’
Anne looked up. ‘Yes, I know. Probably he exaggerates. And even if Bonaparte does have plans of that sort, he will never succeed while our navy patrols the Channel.’
‘You have a very proper faith in your father’s service,’ the Count said.
‘The last war proved the English navy invincible. I am not afraid of any threat of invasion.’ But the talk of war had reminded her how far from home she was, and how unlikely it was that she would ever see England again. She had chosen travel and adventure freely and gladly, but she could not repress a pang of sadness at the thought of the small green island that had bred her, of its soft skies and gentle hills and its courteous, independent people – her own people. The Count noted the brightness of her eyes, and took immediate remedial action.
‘You will have a glass of wine, Miss Peters – unwatered, I think,’ he said bracingly. ‘And then early to bed. We begin the harder part of our journey tomorrow.’
Anne obeyed him, grateful for his concern, and hugged that thought to her for comfort as she drifted off to sleep. As so often, she dreamed of travelling, jolting and twitching the miles away in her sleep.
After Dresden, her sense of unreality increased, and she lost all sense of time and distance. The roads grew steadily worse and the towns further apart; the accommodation more primitive, and the food more variable. At one inn she was shown to a room where the bed was jumping with fleas, and at another there were no sheets on the bed, only damp, musty-smelling blankets. But another, though simply furnished, was spotlessly clean, and the hostess, in starched cap and embroidered apron, brought them a delectable venison stew, fragrant with herbs, and a meltingly delicious cheesecake, freshly baked.
Their rate of travel decreased, and it took a week to reach Warsaw. Shortly after leaving Warsaw, the carriage went off the road into a rut almost deep enough to be called a ditch, and the resultant damage to wheels and axle caused their first serious delay, as they were obliged to stay for two days while repairs were carried out. They were too far from Warsaw to be able to use the time to explore the ancient city, and there was nothing whatever to see or do in the town where they were stranded. Anne took the opportunity to have some washing done while the Count read and slept. Then they took to the road again, passing through towns with increasingly unpronounceable names, some hardly bigger than villages, and through many areas of obvious poverty, where the fields seemed poor and stony, the cattle thin, and the peasant houses mean and dirty.
Four days later, they reached Grodno on the river Nieman, and when they had crossed the wooden bridge to the other side, the Count turned to Anne with a triumphant smile and said, ‘Now we are in Russia. Now we are home!’
‘And how long will it be before we reach your house?’ Anne asked, gazing around her in a rather dazed way, as if she expected to see the roof and chimneys appear on the horizon.