Kirov now had a fair idea what those policemen had been doing, but he said nothing. The fewer people who knew about the plan the better: word had a way of getting around.
‘We saw plenty of signs of looting back there,’ he said. ‘I suppose it’s inevitable.’
Tolly shrugged. ‘Not our problem now. Here, Khastov! Turn those carts aside! Civilians must wait for the infantry to pass over first!’
‘Has the Commander-in-Chief come through yet, sir?’ Kirov asked.
‘Not yet. He’s only going as far as Panki today – that’s where the new headquarters will be.’ He glanced with mild curiosity at Anne and her maid, and said, ‘You can go on, if you like. It might be better for you to get your party settled before the staff arrive – make sure of a decent lodging. There’s going to be quite a crowd later on.’
‘Thank you sir. I’m sure you’re right.’
‘All right. Khastov – let the Colonel’s party through.’
They were about to ride forward to join the column at the bridgehead, when there was a distant loud explosion behind them, from somewhere near the centre of the town. The horses snorted and laid back their ears, and the soldiers faltered and looked back over their shoulders.
‘Keep ’em moving, sergeant!’ Tolly called out. A column of black smoke climbed up vertically into the sky, growing thicker even as they watched. Tolly snapped his fingers for a telescope; and after a moment he said, ‘It looks like a fire in the Kitai-Gorod section. I suppose some looter or deserter’s been careless. Nothing to do with us, anyway.’
Kitai-Gorod was the merchant’s section of the city. Kirov thought they could hardly have chosen a better site for the first incendiary: it was a tightly packed area of wooden buildings, shops and warehouses full of oil and wool and rope and candles and paint and spirits – everything that would burn most readily. He said nothing, and escorted Anne forward to cross the bridge. At the highest point of the span, he turned in the saddle to look back at Moscow and salute it inwardly, for what he knew, now, was the last time.
Once they were over the bridge and outside the city walls, they were able to slip out of the column and overtake the slow-moving infantry and wagons. Further towards Panki, they caught up with a convoy of oddly shaped covered carts, and it was only as they were passing them that Kirov recognised them belatedly as the municipal fire-fighting pumps. Rostopchin must have ordered them to be taken out of the city that morning. He had certainly, Kirov thought, done his job thoroughly.
The Roads out of Moscow
Chapter Thirty-Two
Moscow burned for almost three days. The fire in Kitai-Gorod was only the beginning, for even while French grenadiers were hurrying to the scene, dragging goods out of the warehouses and fighting to contain the blaze, fuses were smouldering in other parts of the city. Every few hours an explosion would signal an outbreak in yet another district. By dawn on the 16th, the fires were out of control, fanned by a strong wind which, by changing direction several times during the next two days, ensured that more and more buildings caught and were consumed.
The Russian army, moving crablike, slowly south and west around the city, travelled by the light of the blaze. During the night of the 16th it was so bright it was possible to read by it six or seven miles away. The whole horizon glowed a lurid, ghastly orange-red; by day the smoke hung over Moscow like black storm clouds. The task of the French fire-fighters within the stricken city was impossible: they soon discovered what the Muscovites of course knew – that even the handsome palaces of the rich were in fact built of wood, with nothing but a thin facade of stone, marble, or stucco, insufficient to stop them, too, from catching fire and burning fiercely.
The army marched mostly in silence. There was nothing cheering in that distant glow, or the thought that the holy city was being devoured. It was thin comfort to know that it would not now offer shelter to the French; a little more comfort to know that the French advance guard had been thoroughly fooled by the Cossacks and were even now following an imaginary army down the road towards Ryazan.
In the early hours of the 18th, rain began to fall, growing heavier and more persistent as the day went on, and extinguishing the lurid glare of the fire on the horizon. Travelling that day was miserable: low clouds closed in the horizon, and shrouded everything in a grey twilight; the rain was cold and unrelenting. The columns first splashed, then squelched, and finally laboured through slippery mud. The horses laid back their ears and shivered, their coats flat and dark with rain, as they hauled the heavy caissons and wagons along the rutted road. Ditches became fast-running streams, sometimes overflowing across the road in a tea-coloured flood. By the time they arrived at last at Podolsk on the Tula Road, everyone was thoroughly soaked, chilled and splashed with sticky mud.
Kirov sent Adonis on ahead to secure some kind of lodgings for them, for he was worried about Anne, who had been increasingly silent as the day went on. She was suffering, he thought, from a reaction – and it was not to be wondered at. The things she had witnessed in the last month would have been enough to destroy a weaker woman. She drooped in the saddle, rain streaming from her collar and the brim of her hat, tendrils of soaked hair dripping on her cheeks. Her condition was only less pitiable than Pauline’s, who was suffering, in addition to everything else, with severe saddle soreness from the unaccustomed cross-saddle position.
Adonis met them on the outskirts of the town, and directed them by a side road away from the centre to a little inn on the back road to Kolomna. Here, thanks to Adonis’s threatening appearance and his liberal handling of his master’s purse, they were received kindly, and given a decent room, with a small private sitting-room attached, in which a birch-log fire was burning, still a little fitfully, under the chimney.
‘They’ve promised a truckle bed in here for the maid,’ Adonis announced, going in ahead of them to stir up the fire.
‘And what about you?’ Kirov enquired ironically. ‘Or didn’t you think to ask?’
Adonis gave one of his equivocal grimaces. ‘I’ll sleep with the horses. I don’t trust anyone, not this close to Moscow. But don’t worry – I know how to make myself comfortable.’
Pauline, her fingers stiff from cold, but simply grateful not to be sitting down, was helping Anne to take off her sodden cloak and hat. The room was musty-smelling and chilly, for the fire wouldn’t draw properly: even as Adonis poked at it, a spat of rain came down the chimney and sizzled on the logs, sending a cloud of pale smoke out into the room.
‘The wood’s damp,’ Adonis announced. ‘Have you got your flask there, Colonel?’
A capful of vodka thrown into the flames caused a minor explosion but made them burn up bright and blue for an instant; and soon there was a cheerful sound of crackling from the logs. Kirov looked at his drooping love and her numb-fingered maid, and took pity.
‘Pauline, go next door and get out of your wet clothes. I’ll take care of your mistress. Go on, now, don’t argue with me. Adonis, do you think you can get them to send up some hot wine?’
When they were alone again, Kirov sat Anne down by the fire, and knelt before her to pull off her wet boots and stockings, and to chafe her feet with a rough towel. She blinked with pleasure at the returning warmth, and then bent her head while Nikolai dried her hair.
‘I never thought,’ she said, ‘that I would ever have you at my feet like this.’