In an instant Marianne found herself torn from her friends, half submerged in a welter of waving arms, and borne irresistibly back towards the river. Convinced that she had been caught up in a revolt and believing that her last hour had come, she uttered a shrill scream: 'Jason! Help!'
He heard her. Kicking and righting his way he managed to get to her and grabbed her wrist and together they tried to fight their way against the fierce, undisciplined tide. But it was impossible. Better to let themselves be carried along if they did not want to be thrown down and trampled underfoot, which would have been certain death.
Without knowing how it happened, the two of them found themselves swept back across the Kremlin bridge and into a small square where a few houses and a church, painted like a theatre backdrop, huddled up against the high walls of a large building with a bright green leaded roof that occupied the river frontage and turned out to be the Foundling Hospital.
Here there were far fewer people than on the bridge, for the overflow had been diverted along the quays beside the Moskva, and Marianne, gasping and half-suffocated, sank down on a convenient mounting block to get her breath. It was only then that she realized that she was alone with Jason and Shankala. One of the girl's hands, still clutching the privateer's belt, showed clearly how it was that she had been able to keep up with them.
'Where are the others?' Marianne asked.
Jason shrugged and waved his arm to take in the square, which was like the crater of a volcano on the point of eruption.
'In there somewhere!'
'But we must try and find them—'
Tired as she was, she was already struggling to her feet ready to launch herself again into the seething mass had he not held her back by main force.
'Don't be insane! You'd only get yourself killed to no purpose. Think yourself lucky to have got out of that in one piece.' Seeing her eyes begin to fill with tears, he added more gently: 'Craig and Gracchus are well able to look after themselves. As for Jolival, he's no fool. I'd be very much surprised if he came to grief in there.'
'But what are we going to do? How shall we ever find them?'
'The best thing is to simply hang around this damned square and wait for them. This little spot of trouble won't last for ever. These people will either leave the city like the rest or go back to their homes. Then all we have to do is to head back to the place where we were separated. The others are certain to do the same. It'd be crazy to go wandering about a strange city at random.'
What he said made sense, as Marianne readily admitted. She would even have enjoyed the fact of being alone with him, in whatever hysterical circumstances, had it not been for Shankala who was still clinging tightly to Jason and staring fixedly at her without saying a word and with an enigmatic expression in her black eyes. It was as if she had abandoned her own personality and turned herself into a kind of familiar animal, silent but persistent, sticking close to her master's heels.
'You are quite right,' Marianne said with a sigh. 'We will stay here, then, and wait for things to clear, if they ever do.'
Certainly, although the crowd in Red Square seemed to be growing calmer and thinning out, access to the bridge was still practically impossible on account of the packed convoys of wounded which had emerged simultaneously from three different side streets. If they had all been on foot the bridge could have absorbed them easily but those able to walk were far outnumbered by the ones being carried on improvised stretchers and there were also a fair number of carts moving along amid the pitiful train from which came a continual groaning intermingled with cries of pain as the injured were jostled by the crowd.
Here and there a house which happened to be still inhabited opened its door to the wounded but the majority went on towards the military hospital and the two private hospitals on the other side of the river, not far from the Kremlin.
'We'll never get through,' Marianne said impatiently. 'The riverside is black with people.'
'Especially since the people in question are soldiers. Look! I can see horsemen over there. Cossacks!'
His seaman's eyes, accustomed to peering through the worst weather at sea, had picked out the soldiers while Marianne's could still perceive nothing more than a kind of red haze beyond the distant head of the convoy.
'The Russians must be in full retreat,' Jason went on. "They must be falling back to defend the city. We can't stay here. We're in danger of being trampled underfoot by the horses.'
"Well, where do you want to go? I'm not leaving here until we've found the others.'
'I caught sight of an inn in that little square over there. Let's try and get to it. You still have some money on you?'
Marianne nodded. She had lost her valise, of course. It had been torn from her in the rush. But she had got into the habit of carrying her money and the invaluable podaroshna in an inner pocket of her dress. Even so, she felt reluctant to leave her perch. The inn did not look particularly easy to reach. A man and two aproned women were standing at the door, washing a filthy wound here and offering a cup of wine there to men who paused briefly and went on. The man and his womenfolk were labouring unsparingly, with a warmth and generosity that compelled admiration. Anyone could see that they were ready to give the poor soldiers everything in their house, but Marianne wondered whether their welcome would extend equally to foreign travellers.
A flung stone, narrowly missing her and breaking a window at her back, made up her mind for her. She jumped up with a cry, but not quickly enough to avoid a splinter of glass which cut her on the forehead just below the hairline. Jason caught her to him and took out his handkerchief to staunch the little trickle of blood.
'Damned savages!' he fumed. 'Have they nothing better to do than go about breaking their own windows?'
Marianne had turned round to observe the damage and she pointed wordlessly to the gaily painted signboard, depicting a magnificent cream cake, which announced that at the sign of the Puits d'Amour the brothers Lalonde could be relied upon to supply their clients with the finest pastries in all Moscow, as well as every kind of French sweetmeat from bêtises of Cambrai to bergamotes of Nancy, not forgetting the marzipans of Aix and Agen plums.
'The surprising thing is that the house is still standing at all,' Marianne said. 'You are right. We'll try the inn. Another minute and it will be too late.'
They set off again, Shankala still at their heels, and endeavoured to force a passage through to the doorway. A lucky thinning of the stream moving towards the bridge at last allowed them to reach the three outside the inn, whose white aprons were stained by now with wine and blood.
Marianne spoke to the man.
'We are travellers from the south. We have come a long way. Can you give us lodging?' she asked, speaking in French but with an attempt to recover her former English accent.
For an innkeeper, the man did not appear to be very partial to strangers, because he regarded her suspiciously.
'Where have you come from?' he asked in the same language but with an accent so thick as to be almost incomprehensible.
'From Odessa.'
'That's a fair way. What are you? Italian? French?'
"No, no, English!' she told him quickly, smarting at the necessity for the lie, and also at her lack of success so far. 'I am Lady Selton and these – these people are my servants.'