Barbe waved her whip to show that she had understood and the kibitka rolled on into the white whirlwind on the road to Vilna, some fifty leagues farther on. When it was no longer visible, Fournier-Sarlovèze gave an angry shrug and put up his sleeve to brush away a drop of moisture from his cheek. Then he turned and walked back to his horse and springing lightly into the saddle trotted back to the head of his troop. The last bridge across the Berezina was left alone in the rising storm with only the dead for company. By next day, it was gone.
In the snow, the road to Vilna proved to be a terrible ordeal for the two women.. On the day after her enforced bathe in the Berezina, Marianne was coughing her lungs out and shivering with fever. By now she had no need to feign illness. She lay in the back of the kibitka, muffled up in blankets and in Fournier's great cloak, enduring the agonizing jolting without a murmur of complaint because she would not add to Barbe's difficulties.
Barbe's courage and fortitude were quite incredible. She slept for no more than three hours a night and she saw to everything. When they halted for the night she would make a fire and cook the invalid a soup of flour, rice and such few vegetables as they had left, concoct hot possets out of melted snow and heat up large stones that could be slipped inside Marianne's blankets at night to keep her warm. Nor did she neglect the horse but curried him at every halt, fed him, even put a blanket over him and saw that he was tethered out of the wind. By day, she sat stolidly in the driving seat, her eyes fixed on the line of the road, which was inclined to be haphazard except where it ran through trees. She had even used the gun against a pack of wolves, handling it with a skill denoting long practice. Her whole being was concentrated on a single thought: to get to Vilna, where the house where they were to put up belonged to a Jewish apothecary who was also a physician.
It was not more than a week after their adventure at Studianka that they caught their first sight of Vilna. Nestling in a line of hills, between the arms of two rivers, the Wilia and the Wilenka, it was built around an impressive mound, the long-ago tomb of the earliest Lithuanian princes, and surmounted by a red brick citadel. Streaming from its highest point was the imperial eagle of France on its tricolour ground, and beside it the personal standard of the Duke of Bassano, who governed the city for Napoleon. Here there was no longer any fear of cossacks. The town was undamaged, well-provisioned and well-defended.
In summer weather, the Lithuanian capital, set amid rolling hills, with its white walls, red roofs, domes and baroque, Italianate palaces and its magnificent churches presented a gay and colourful appearance but now the colours were dulled by the universal covering of snow. Even so, the sight of the lovely city drew a great sigh of relief from Barbe.
'Here we are at last! Now we'll be able to take proper care of you. All we have to do now is to find out where Moïse Chakhna lives. And we'll stay there for as long as it takes to get you well again.'
'No!' Marianne protested, making painful efforts to sit up. 'I don't want to stay – not more than two or three days, so that you can have a rest, Barbe. Then we'll go on.'
'But it's madness! You are ill – very ill, I think. Do you want to die?'
'I – shan't – die! We must go on. I want – to get to Danzig as soon as possible – do you understand? As soon as possible!'
A violent fit of coughing shook her and she fell back, bathed in sweat. Realizing that it was better not to persist, Barbe shrugged and set out to look for their host in the city.
Moïse Chakhna's house was in the suburb of Antokol, not far from the bank of the Wilia and next door to a pretty, half-ruined Italianate palace which had belonged to the powerful Radziwill family. Unlike the Jewish houses they had seen before, it was a place of some style, for the Jewish community in Vilna was both rich and influential. The majority lived in the centre of the city, in a jumble of dark and tortuous alleyways bounded by the three principal streets, but some of the most eminent dwelt on the outskirts, in houses befitting their wealth and abilities.
Marianne and Barbe were welcomed there with an almost biblical hospitality. As in the other places where they had stayed, no one asked them any questions, although it must have been apparent that they were not of the people of Israel. Solomon's letters clearly worked as a powerful charm. Moïse Chakhna and his wife Esther did everything necessary for the invalid but when she told them of her wish to continue her journey in two days' time, the apothecary frowned.
'You cannot do it. You are suffering from severe bronchitis. You must stay in bed and, what is most important, you must avoid all risk of catching cold again, for you would be risking your life.'
Even then she persisted, with the obstinacy of the very sick. Her determination was strengthened now by fear of these vast, inhospitable wastes of country with their endless snows and sunless, hopeless skies. She wanted to escape from them as soon as she could. The thought had become an obsession with her, fixed in her head like the barbed arrow of some demon archer. To tear it out now might be to tip her over into madness.
What she longed for was to see the sea again, even in a port so northerly as Danzig.
The sea was her friend, a friend that had always spared her life, even though it had more than once put it in danger. The sound of the sea washing the shores of England had lulled her through most of her childhood and for years now it had carried all her dreams, her hopes, her love. In the depths of her illness, Marianne was convinced that somehow everything would be miraculously all right, her health restored and her sufferings at an end, as soon as she came safe to a harbour.
Barbe, worried as she was, could still understand the sick girl's overriding longing to be gone.
'Do what you can for her,' she said to Moïse. 'I will try to make her stay another two or three days by telling her how tired I am, but I don't think it will be any good.'
In fact it was five days before Marianne declared that she would wait no longer and by that time the fever had almost left her.
'I must go to Danzig,' she kept repeating. 'I know I shall be strong enough for that. But I must go quickly – as quickly as I can. Something is waiting there for me.'
She could not for the life of her have explained just why it was that she felt so certain. Barbe, in any case, put it down to her illness. But as she had lain there with the fever on her, her mind wandering in vague feverish dreams, Marianne had gradually convinced herself that her fate was waiting for her there, in that Baltic port where she had so longed to go with Jason. Perhaps, after all, that fate would take the form of a ship…
Barbe was no actress but she was still trying manfully, and with no success at all, to portray a woman in the last stages of exhaustion, when she received the first direct order she had ever had from her mistress. She was to have the kibitka ready to leave tomorrow, Marianne told her, and when Barbe tried to argue she was told that Kovno, the next and final stage of the kibitka's journey, was no more than twenty leagues ahead of them. Marianne was in haste, too, to hand over the precious package entrusted to her to Solomon's cousin. It was beginning to weigh on her mind. In her weakened state, her mind had begun to play superstitiously with the belief that those jewels, taken from a church, might be a cause, if not the only one, of all her sufferings. Moreover, those pearls had only narrowly escaped ending in the Berezina along with herself.
Barbe found her orders all the more distressing because they were interrupted by frequent fits of coughing. As a last resort it seemed to her that the physician's voice might be more effective than her own, but much to her surprise she found, when she went in search of Moïse, that his eagerness to detain them in his house had waned considerably. Unless, that was, they were willing to remain there alone and exposed to possible unpleasantness.