He had already repaired his self-esteem by taking up with a pretty serf girl who worked in the house. Though he was cool towards Tatiana, he remained polite. He told himself that the child was an accident and that it was beneath his dignity to think about it any further.
It only remained to name the boy. The custom was simple: the firstborn son was usually named after his grandfather, others, often, by the saint’s day nearest their birth.
‘You are fortunate,’ the priest remarked to them when he came. ‘His name day is the feast of St Sergius.’ Sergei it was therefore.
That gave a name and patronymic of Sergei Alexandrovich, since he was the official father. Not bad.
‘Sergei.’ Tatiana smiled. And then, looking at the child, she called to him, using the diminutive of Sergei: ‘Seriozha, come to your mother.’
‘Of course,’ Alexander said to her calmly, ‘this one will not inherit anything of mine. When I die, you will receive a widow’s portion. You can provide for him out of that. Meanwhile, I’ll provide for his education.’
Tatiana inclined her head. The subject was not mentioned again.
And so Sergei Alexandrovich Bobrov came into the world.
Six months later, Alexander resumed relations with his wife. In 1803, a daughter was born. They called her Olga.
1812, March
What a tumultuous time this was, these days of war and peace. Who would have guessed that out of the fire of the French Revolution – the fire of liberty, equality, fraternity – would emerge this astounding conqueror who made the whole world tremble? Napoleon: hero to some, ogre to others. Did he mean, like Julius Caesar or even Genghis Khan, to rule the world? Probably. And though the enlightened Tsar Alexander – the Angel, they still called him – had tried to preserve Russia from the horrors of these European wars, it seemed now, in the early spring of 1812, that Napoleon and his formidable Grand Army were preparing to invade from the west.
All Russia trembled. The Orthodox Church declared that Napoleon was the Antichrist. The Tsar called the country to arms. And if there had been some amongst the gentry who felt that the golden age of Alexander had not lived up to its promise, that the expected reforms had been few and unimportant, all this was suddenly forgotten as, in drawing rooms all over the empire, they rallied to ‘The Angel’.
It was a chilly, overcast day before the start of spring. The snow still lay hard upon the ground, and the Bobrov family were sitting in the salon of their country house, waiting for news.
The house was typical of its kind: a narrow, two-storey wooden structure about eighty feet long. The walls had been painted green; the windows picked out in white. The centre boasted a simple classical portico with four pillars, all in wood and painted white, which provided a spacious verandah. Two little single-storey wings that Tatiana had added, of two rooms each, extended from the ends. From the house’s position near the top of the wooded slope, the village was hidden by some trees, but there was a pleasant view down to the river. Behind it were various outbuildings. A little to the left was a wooden hut, half-submerged into the ground; this was the ice house, where ice from the frozen river in winter was stored through the warm summer months. On the right of the house was the bath house: another squat building made of huge, unpainted logs. So peaceful did this ensemble appear, that one might have supposed it had always been there. In fact, however, there had been nothing before Alexander’s father and it represented a profound change in the life of the family and of the village.
For the notion of a country house was still new to Russia. The knight’s manor and the magnate’s castle, so much the rule in England or France, could be found as far east as Poland – but in old Muscovy they had been completely unknown. As for the country villa of the Renaissance, with its cultivated pursuit of leisure – the idea would have been unimaginable. Until the eighteenth century, when the Bobrovs visited their estates, they had always stayed in houses within the walled town of Russka. Though a noble who was very poor might find himself living in a village, in a house almost indistinguishable from the peasants’, only after the reign of Peter the Great did landowners even begin to live like European squires.
Their country houses were nearly always modest. While Russian rulers and their favourites had palaces that might rival those of Germany or France, the houses of men like Bobrov would have seemed makeshift to an English gentleman. Indeed, their construction and scale were far closer to those of the landowners in the newly freed colonies of America.
Only one thing had spoiled the tranquillity of the Bobrovs – the name of their village: Dirty Place. When they had lived in Russka it had not mattered, but when he came to live on the estate, Alexander had found the name offensive and absurd. He had toyed with various new names before inclining towards one derived from that of his own family: Bobrovo. Bobrovo, therefore, was now the official designation of the village and estate, though some of the older peasants still referred to it as Dirty Place.
Today there was a sense of expectancy in the house. In the area around Moscow, new regiments were nastily being raised. The previous afternoon, Bobrov had received a personal letter from the military governor of Vladimir asking him to supply more serfs as recruits. The peasants in the village had been drawing lots that very morning and shortly he would hear who had been chosen.
His own second son, Alexis, though only nineteen, was proudly serving as an infantry officer. Every time anyone approached the house, Tatiana would rush to the door, hoping they might be bringing a letter from him. Patriotism, excitement, seemed to be in the air.
And yet, in all these preparations, there was one great problem that filled Alexander Bobrov with a special sense of foreboding.
‘For it’s not Napoleon’s troops I fear so much,’ he told Tatiana. ‘It’s our own people.’ The serfs.
When the story of Napoleon’s great invasion of Russia is told, it is often forgotten that, in the months leading up to it, a great many Russian landowners feared an internal revolution more than they feared the invader. And for this view there was good reason. All over Europe, the conquering emperor of the French had claimed to be liberating people from their rulers in the name of the Revolution: to many of them he was a hero. Indeed, of the huge force who were to march with him into Russia in 1812 – the legendary Grand Army – less than half were French at all. And of all these European contingents, none fought more eagerly than those from the next-door Polish territories – formerly grabbed by Austria and Prussia when unhappy Poland was partitioned – whom Napoleon had indeed liberated. No wonder then if Russian leaders feared that their own subjugated Poles, and their oppressed Russian serfs, might rise in sympathy with this liberating army. ‘He’ll do what Pugachev failed to do, and give us a real revolution,’ Bobrov had predicted gloomily.
If the outside world was full of danger, however, the salon where the Bobrovs were sitting was a scene of quiet, domestic calm. There were several pieces of rather stiff English furniture, two ancestral pictures and some sombre classical landscapes, all brought from St Petersburg. But the general impression of the room was still one of friendly disorder.
Alexander and Tatiana were sitting in armchairs. He wore an old blue English coat, cravat and silk stockings; she wore a long, high-waisted pink dress, with a bright shawl draped over her shoulders. In her hands was a piece of embroidery. Near the fire sat their eldest surviving son, twenty-two-year-old Ilya. He had his mother’s round face and fair hair. He was reading a book. In Alexander’s opinion, the young man should have been away fighting, like his brother. But perhaps because, back in ’89, she had so nearly lost him at birth, Tatiana had always kept him at home, insisting he was delicate. ‘He doesn’t look delicate to me,’ Alexander would grumble. ‘He just looks fat and lazy.’ It was a pity he had let Tatiana spoil the boy, because Ilya was intelligent. But Alexander could not be bothered to do anything about it now.