Flight From the Eagle (18 page)

Countess Barova still looked troubled. 'Oh,
please
don't be angry!'

Orlov saw that she was quite upset at the thought. He put his arm round her shoulders and gave her a brotherly hug— at least, he told himself defensively, it was meant to be brotherly, even if he did rather spoil the effect by kissing her neck just below her left ear; it was only quite a small
kiss, and the two men behind them had their eyes shut. She neither pulled away nor leaned towards him, and he was struck by the thought that although she was clearly inexperienced in dealing with men, her natural dignity seemed to equip her to handle most situations, and she emerged from this one without having either encouraged over-familiarity or discouraged genuine friendliness.

'I wasn't really angry before,' he said. 'That night I was tired and irritable, annoyed with myself for being clumsy. I don't really mean to order you about and I'm sorry if I seem to do so. I suppose I've had too many years of giving orders to others and it's become second nature—and after all, I am an Orlov!'

'Have you always been able to do as you please?' she asked, quite seriously and with what sounded like a touch of wilfulness.

He answered her equally seriously, 'To be honest, no! I find that I'm forever being forced into doing things I don't wish to do at all because I feel obliged to do them. Does that sound stupid? This journey's a good example. All I wanted to do when we started was to crawl into a quiet hole somewhere and be ill and miserable in peace, but instead of that, I felt under some peculiar obligation to collect these men together and take them out of the way of the French—and do you know why? For the utterly ridiculous reason that I happened to be with them during the attack in which we were wounded. Does it make any sort of sense?'

She looked at him curiously for a moment and then said, 'I expect you were the sort of little boy who filled the house with fledglings fallen out of nests, jackdaws with broken wings and lame hedgehogs.'

'I've never met a lame hedgehog,' he assured her gravely. 'It was a fox with a broken leg.'

She began to smile. 'I expect I'm the lame hedgehog,' she said, and when he replied, 'Is that why you prickle up when I try to help you?' they both laughed.

'Am I very prickly?' She was suddenly serious again.

'No. In fact, I don't think you can be a hedgehog. I think you ruffle up your feathers a little, like an indignant sparrow.'

'Sparrows are very dull little birds,' she said.

'Have you ever really looked at one? They're charming, dainty little creatures with pretty markings, and a great deal of pluck. I've seen three or four of them mob a cat as bravely as you please. They're not in the least dull.' He was not flirting with her but speaking quite sincerely.

'Now, Kusminsky's a rook,' he continued the train of thought. 'Wise, kind and cynical.'

'One can't be kind
and
cynical!' she objected.

'He is!' Orlov was quite unabashed. 'And Kolniev's a starling: brash, efficient and somehow both smart and untidy!'

She laughed. 'And what are you?'

'I'm a robin,' he replied. 'Cocky, confident, domineering, bold as brass! When I'm out of the army, I shall always wear a scarlet waistcoat—my tailor shall make them by the dozen!'

'I think you're—' she hesitated, looking into the far distance with a curiously sad expression on her face. 'You're an eagle!' she finished, dropping her eyes to a point midway between the horses she was driving.

Orlov was rather taken aback and sat silent for some time while he digested this statement. At length, the Countess asked him in a normal, polite conversational tone if his sister had been widowed very long. Orlov told her about his dull, middle-aged brother-in-law, who had died so tragically only a few months after the marriage and her questions led him on to talk about his sister, their childhood, and their home.

He was surprised when Kolniev gave a shout which caused Josef to turn the leading cart off the road into a wide, grassy clearing where there was room for all the carts. He saw that they had reached another river, this time one which flowed through a steep-sided ravine lined with trees and bushes. The bridge, thank God! was intact. He realized with a start that he had spent the whole morning talking to the Countess without noticing the heat, the dust, the constant nagging ache in his arm or the jolting of the cart.

He handed her down from the box after jumping down himself with a carelessness which cost him the usual spell of dizziness but it passed more quickly this time, and he strode off with Kolniev to look at the bridge with a great deal more vigour than he had shown for some time. The Countess
watched him go with a
look on her face which made Kus
minsky bite his lip as he caught sight of it while he was swinging himself down from his saddle.

When he had given his horse into the charge of one of the men, he strolled over to the Countess and said gently, 'He wouldn't hurt you intentionally, I'm sure. He's a good man, but he's attractive to women I should imagine and rather takes their interest for granted. Will you help me with some of the dressings? I'd like to look at some of them while the cooks are getting the water boiling.'

Countess Barova made no comment on the first part of his speech and went with him to attend to some of his patients with her usual air of calm composure. Orlov joined them in a few moments to ask Kusminsky how the men were progressing. The surgeon asked him to wait a minute while he finished what he was doing, then he would give a full report. While he waited, Orlov noticed that Countess Bat-ova's smooth coronet of plaits had slipped a little and he said, 'Are you running very short of hairpins?'

She put her hand to her hair and said, 'Yes, I am! If I lose one more, I shall have to stop putting it up.' She looked hot and tired. Orlov noticed for the first time that day how hot and oppressive the atmosphere had become—even more sultry than on previous days, and they had been bad enough.

'I think we're in for...' he began, and quickly altered what he had been about to say to 'a hot afternoon', remembering her fear of thunderstorms.

'Now then!' said Kusminsky, in his incisive voice. 'Thank you for your help, Count
ess. I expect you'll be glad of
a chance to wash off the dust before we eat.' The Countess smiled and went away while Kusminsky strolled away from the carts and the men with Orlov following. When they were out of earshot of the others, he gave a brisk run-through of the condition and progress of his patients, finishing, 'Apart from the pigheaded ones like you, they're doing as they're told and healing pretty well. I'm not particularly anxious about anyone and, barring accidents and infections
, I think they'll all survive.'

'You're a damned good doctor!' said Orlov.

'Hm. I can strap up a broken leg and let nature take its
course,' the surgeon replied. 'I doubt-if I could do much about a broken heart.'

Orlov gave him a puzzled look, and Kusminsky sighed. 'My charming assistant is not one of your Petersburg princesses,' he said. 'Neither is she an opera-dancer or anything like that.'

'I know that,' said Orlov stiffly.

'I dare say you're fairly well acquainted with the first two at least? A man in your position is bound to be. I merely observe that the Countess is ... otherwise. I suppose you're aware that you're very attractive to women?'

Orlov frowned and looked put out.

Kusminsky sighed again and said, 'I'm hot, dusty, tired and short-tempered. Perhaps I should go and stand on my head in the river for a while.' With that, he walked away towards the steep bank, leaving Orlov scowling after him and feeling vaguely ashamed of himself.

Josef roused him from his abstraction by coughing discreetly and indicating the bucket of water and towel he had brought. His master asked him with an assumption of jocularity if he was enjoying the journey. Josef allowed himself an expressive glance which conveyed a great deal more than his restrained, 'It has a certain novelty,' and raised a genuine smile of amusement from Orlov.

The quality of the cheese served with the hard bread and coffee for the midday refreshment did not seem to have improved and Kolniev said disgustedly, 'It was a mistake eating the poor stuff first. This was quite decent cheese when we started, but the heat has ruined it.'

'I wonder it hasn't melted altogether,' Kusminsky observed, mopping his face with a large handkerchief. 'I don't know when I've been so hot. I wish to God we could have a storm to clear the air a bit.'

Countess Barova said nothing but Orlov almost felt her stiffen, although she was sitting on the far side of the table of boxes. He looked across at her and met her eyes with his steady gaze, trying to convey sympathy and understanding and after a moment she relaxed, looking down with a little colour in her pale cheeks. Neither of the others noticed and Kolniev rambled on about an extraordinarily hot summer he remembered in his childhood, which Kusminsky dismissed as
tepid compared with the oven-like heat of the present. The two of them fell into a mock-ferocious wrangling which amused them both a great deal.

This eventually died away after Kusminsky suddenly changed his tone, saying that Kolniev was too young to remember what real summers were like and settled himself down for one of his catnaps. Kolniev threw an acorn at him, missed, and then rolled over onto his stomach, propping his chin on his folded arms.

'I'll be glad when it gets a bit cooler, anyway,' he said. 'This heat drains everyone of energy and makes everything seem worse than it really is. Thank God that bridge is still there! Hauling this lot down that bank and up the other side in this heat would kill us all. I'm glad you're looking better, Major—it's been all wrong these last couple of days, not seeing you riding along at the front. It makes us all feel like lost sheep.'

Orlov's demon sense of responsibility immediately forced him to say that he intended to ride that afternoon and Kolniev looked worried.

'Are you sure?' he asked anxiously. 'I didn't mean ... shouldn't you wait another day?'

'No use arguing with him,' Kusminsky said gloomily, his eyes still closed. 'General Raevsky's a good judge of character,' he added obscurely.

Countess Barova looked at Orlov imploringly and opened her mouth as if to speak. Then she closed it again and looked away. Orlov spoke to her as much as to anyone. 'It's no worse than jolting along in an unsprung cart,' he said. 'That grey has a very smooth action and he doesn't bounce in and out of every pothole in the road.'

There was no further argument and all four of them drowsed for half an hour or so in the shade until Orlov reluctantly decided that they had better start on the afternoon's travelling. He made the carts cross the bridge one by one, just in case the wooden structure was less strong than it looked. The fact that it was still there was encouraging— presumably the French were not expected here just yet.

The heat seemed to have affected even his grey horse for he ambled along in an unusually docile fashion, twitching
his ears at the ever-present black flies. Everyone had followed Kusminsky's advice and taken off their uniform coats and stocks and the men were dressed in a motley collection of shirts, some filthy and ragged, others almost as clean as Orlov's, which looked reasonably white when they started (thanks to Josef's laundry activities), but was grey with dust and clinging wetly to his body before they had been moving half an hour. It was so long since he had worn his helmet that he was not even sure where it was.

He occupied himself for a time in calculating how far away the French would be, assuming that they had left Smolensk sometime after the 6th of August, two days after the Russians had left the city—surely they couldn't have moved before that? If Bonaparte's men were advancing unopposed, they could be—where, by now?

In the end, he decided that unless he had more information to go on, it simply wasn't possible to calculate. The only safe thing to do was to assume that it was possible that the French were level with them (or even ahead) on the Moscow road, and that an enemy foraging party could come across them at any time all the way to Kaluga. It wasn't a very cheerful conclusion, but more sensible than allowing himself to relax prematurely.

Relax! That was a joke! Why on earth had he been fool enough to say he would ride? Granted that the cart did jolt appallingly and jar his arm, it was not much worse than the movement of the horse and he hadn't really felt it much all the morning—but then he had passed the morning in talking about himself! Poor Sparrow! She must have spent a great deal of her life listening to other people talking about themselves. She was very good at pretending to be interested.

He wondered if she was finding the heat too trying and turned aside to make his tour of the carts in order to find out. When the line had passed him, he rode with Kusminsky for a few minutes and the surgeon said sourly, 'Regretting your decision to ride yet?' Orlov gave him a wan smile and didn't reply.

'I think it would be advisable to stop early today,' Kusminsky continued more seriously. 'I'm finding this weather very trying so it must be misery for some of the men. We don't want anyone collapsing from heat exhaustion.'

Orlov nodded. 'I'll ride up the line and see how they're getting on and then look out for a camp site.' He kicked his horse to a faster pace to catch up with the rearmost cart.