Valentina (23 page)

‘Paul,' she whispered. ‘Paul, it's nearly dawn.'

‘I know,' he murmured. ‘We must start soon.'

‘I have a feeling,' Alexandra said suddenly. ‘I've had it since we left Warsaw—Paul, I can't explain it …'

‘You don't need to,' he said quietly. ‘I've had it too. We won't get out of this alive. Pay no attention, my darling, it's not important. Nothing is important except that we're together.'

‘I hope we find him,' Alexandra said. ‘I want her to be happy. I'm so happy myself at this moment.'

There wasn't time to build another fire; they ate bread and some dried peaches and drank a little water. The sledge moved out into the icy grey morning light, and the journey to Orcha began.

There was only one alternative to surrender for Ney and that was to attack. Sixty thousand men with artillery faced him on the heights of Krasnoi, and he gathered his few thousand and told them they must fight a way through or die. The astonished Russians heard the French buglers sound the ‘Attack' and there began the battle which continued all through the day, with assaults launched by the French against the Russians, with three pauses while the Marshal received General Kutuzov's demands to surrender and dismissed them with contempt. It was impossible to break through; as night fell and the scattered troops regrouped, their dead and wounded were thick in the snow, and those still fighting were using bayonets and rocks, because the ammunition for the muskets had almost run out. De Chavel and the Grenadier were huddled together under a tree; both were too exhausted to speak, and neither had eaten all day. They had lost sight of their Polish companion, and indeed both had forgotten about him.

‘We're finished,' the Grenadier said at last. ‘And I don't care. I'll de damned before I surrender to these swine; but I'm damned if I can do any more. I'm going to sit here and go to sleep and not wake up.'

‘I won't die,' De Chavel mumbled. ‘Not yet. Not lying like a half-frozen dog under a tree—get up, blast you! Get up and help me! I'm going to find Ney if I can.'

They stumbled together through the darkness, and on their way a soldier met them, running clumsily through the deep snow.

‘Go to the right, the Marshal wants you, every man, go to the right!'

Ney stood in the middle of them; they clustered round him, the first two ranks lit by the very large fire which illuminated the Marshal and his little corps of officers. The rest of his men were there but lost in the darkness like ghosts.

‘We can't get through,' he said. ‘We can fight on till we're annihilated, or we can take advantage of the darkness and turn back. The Dnieper is behind us; we'll go to the north and find a crossing there and get on the Orcha road ahead of the Russians.'

‘I won't go back,' a voice rose out of the silent ranks, shrill with despair. ‘I won't march back the way we came.'

‘If you won't,' the Marshal addressed them all, ‘I'll go alone. We're not going to surrender and we're not going to die. We're going to join the Emperor, and this is the way to do it. We march in half an hour.'

The Russians saw the French bivouack fires burning through the night and waited confidently for the final battle the next morning. But when morning came and their advance parties approached the French camp they found the place deserted. Ney and his men had gone, hidden by the night, taking their wagons with them. As the Russians followed the trail of dead they left behind them, the remnant of the rearguard was crossing the Dnieper over a ford made of jammed ice floes, leaving their transport and their few guns on the opposite bank. It was Duclos, Ney's young staff officer, who noticed De Chavel sitting on the ground as the advance began. The Grenadier had dropped on the march, and De Chavel had staggered the last mile alone, reeling like a drunken man with weakness and hunger. At the river bank he collapsed; he had no reserves left, either of strength or will, and the younger man dragged him bodily across the treacherous, shifting ice, slipping and stumbling with the dead weight hanging on him, and when they had crossed he took the semi-conscious Colonel's one arm and hooked it round his own neck, and holding him by the waist, he kept him walking until nightfall. Duclos was only in his twenties; he had begun as a graduate of St Cyr and fought in the spectacular campaign against the Russians and Prussians at Eylau and Jena, and again at Austerlitz, when it seemed as if Napoleon could never suffer a defeat and French arms must totally subdue the world. He had been wounded at Viazma, but it was a scratch which healed, he had fought without thinking of personal danger all the way from Smolensk, taking his example from Ney, whom he worshipped. Now he had lost sight of the Marshal, and it was suddenly too difficult to find him in the milling hundreds. It was not only difficult, it was unthinkable that he should go and look; the mind which had sustained so many horrors fastened for sanity on one single task, that of keeping the Colonel alive.

If anything more was asked of Duclos, he would go mad and begin shooting, and he knew this in his quivering reason, and held fast to De Chavel.

‘Let me go,' De Chavel pleaded again and again through the days, when both could hardly walk, and always Duclos shook his head.

‘You mustn't die,' he said. ‘You must get to Orcha. I must get you to Orcha.' And he cared for the Colonel as if he were a child, and stole extra food for him, and wrapped him up in his own ragged cloak and slept beside him. Ney asked where he was fearing that he had been killed in the night skirmishes which still bedevilled them, and when he was told what had happened, he ordered his staff to leave Duclos alone. He had seen men's minds go, and it could take many forms of madness. Nursing a dying comrade with fanatical devotion was quite a common one.

Count Theodore Grunowski had left Warsaw on the advice of his friend Potocki; the advice was given in such a curt way that it resembled a command. The affair of his wife had been disastrously mismanaged, and the fact that his sadistic hanging of his servant had postponed her execution, allowing her to be rescued by the French, only confirmed Potocki's opinion that the Count would do well to retire to Lvov until the scandal had subsided. The outcome of the war was in no doubt; Napoleon was fleeing headlong from Russia, and might even be cut to pieces before he escaped. Those who had supported France would fall under the suspicion and displeasure of the victorious Czar Alexander; some members of the Diet hurried to make their loyalty to the Czar known to Prince Adam Czartorisky, while others resisted the prospect of Russian occupation and domination at the expense of reason, and maintained that Napoleon was not defeated yet. But Grunowski had no alternative but to retire to his estates in disgrace. He had already passed a boring month there when he noticed a familiar face among the house servants. He stepped up and tapped the woman on the shoulder. The round, plain face of his wife's maid Jana looked up at him; she dropped down in a curtsy.

‘What the devil are you doing here?' The light eyes blazed at her; the sight of her reminded him of Valentina, and murder stirred in his mind at the memory.

‘You were with the Countess at Czartatz! How did you get here?'

‘I left when she did, Lord,' Jana whispered. ‘I never wanted to stay with her. I'm only a humble woman but I know a wife's duty. I belong to you, Lord, not to her. I've come back to serve you.'

‘Have you, indeed?' He looked down at her, frowning, not knowing if this were the truth. A moment's reflection assured him that it must be; she had no need to leave Czartatz. The peasant mind was quite incomprehensible; it was quite possible that she rejected her mistress's adultery and desertion. And so she had returned to her master. He put one narrow finger to his chin, and gently rubbed it.

‘I beg of you,' Jana said, ‘let me stay, Lord. This is my home.'

‘You shall stay,' the Count said, ‘but you shall have ten lashes first, for the time you spent away.'

Jana bowed her head; her ugly face was quite expressionless. ‘As my Lord wishes.'

After the punishment she lay in the servants' quarters face down for three days while the marks healed. She had been whipped before, but never since becoming Valentina's maid. She had forgotten what the pain was like, but now she welcomed the reminder. It strengthened her purpose, and the purpose had been firm enough to set her on the way to Lvov, knowing that the Count might kill her because she had been loyal to Valentina, believing that her mistress was dead and that the Count had murdered her. She had watched the Princess Alexandra ride off in pursuit, and seen the spy with his throat cut; she had gone after them very slowly, with all her belongings in a bundle, and arrived at last at Lvov, because sooner or later the Count would come there. The house servants had told her the story, very garbled and unreliable, of her mistress's escape from death, and she thought of this while her back healed, and smiled and gave thanks to God, whose goodness never failed. She had come back to serve the Count. And though it might take a long time before she found the opportunity, she would find it in the end. God had freed her from a husband who was a drunkard and a brute. She would free the Countess with God's blessing and connivance. The means was in a small bottle at the bottom of her bundle.

Chapter 8

Fifteen miles from Orcha the first Cossack patrol attacked the sledge. De Lamballe saw them coming across the snow, a group of about twenty men riding the small, incredibly fast horses from the Steppes, and he yelled at Janos who was riding the lead horse to whip the team up and make for the woods in the distance.

Valentina leant out, and turned back to her sister in alarm. ‘They've seen us, Sandra! They're coming after us!'

‘We'll never outrun them,' Alexandra said. ‘Paul, tell Janos to slow down, tell him to stop!'

‘Don't be a fool,' he answered, ‘they'll kill us if they catch us. Our only hope is to try and run.'

‘They're gaining,' Valentina called back. ‘They've split up into two, one group is turning to the left …'

‘They're going to catch us between them,' Alexandra said. ‘Paul, listen to me, for God's sake. Stop the sledge before they start firing on us, nothing'll stop them then—get under the rugs and let me talk to them. It's our only chance! Please, before it's too late!'

‘She's right,' Valentina said. ‘Sandra's Russian, they won't hurt her. Oh my God!'

The patrol had begun to fire, though they were still too far away to be effective, and the distance between them and the sledge was growing shorter every moment.

‘All right,' de Lamballe said. ‘We've no other chance. But take this, Alexandra, and if anything goes wrong, use it on yourself. I'll account for Valentina. I've no mind to watch them raping both of you before they trample us to death!'

Alexandra took the pistol and hid it under her cloak; he couldn't bring himself to kill her and she understood this. ‘Get on the floor,' she said. ‘They're near enough to see you leaning out. I'll stop Janos.'

They touched hands for a moment, and Valentina realised suddenly what had puzzled her about her sister in the last few days. She had known she and the Major were lovers; it was so obvious when they looked at each other after that night spent in the barn. Until that moment she hadn't known that Alexandra was in love with him. And he with her, so much he couldn't trust himself to pull the trigger. They covered him with the fur rugs, and Alexandra thrust her head out of the sledge and shouted at Janos to stop.

When the patrol caught up with them a few minutes later they found only two ladies inside the sledge, one of whom lay back with her eyes half closed as if she were fainting.

The Lieutenant in command dismounted, and came up to the side; he held a pistol in his right hand and it was cocked and pointed straight at Alexandra's head.

‘What is the meaning of this?' she said in Russian. ‘How dare you give chase to me? Don't you know who I am?'

He stared at her in surprise; he had very light blue eyes and thick fair curls covered his forehead under the fur hat. He had a fierce, stupid face, and it was only when he heard his own language that he hesitated. ‘Who are you?' he said. ‘And what are you doing in this area? Why did you try to escape from us?'

‘I am the Princess Suvarov, and this is my cousin. You had the impudence to fire on us, and she has fainted away with alarm! Put that pistol down, Sir, unless you want me to report you! We're on our way to Orcha, where I believe my other cousin, General Kutuzov, is waiting for us. Does that answer you?'

‘Yes, Highness.' The Lieutenant had enough experience of aristocratic ladies to recognise this one as only too genuine. She spoke to him and looked at him as if he were a stray dog.

‘My apologies for frightening you, but there are no civilians travelling anywhere in this region and you might well have been French refugees or spies. I'm afraid I can't let you go on to Orcha without higher authority. Our commander, General Platov, is only ten miles away with the main body of cavalry. Two of my men will escort you there.'

‘Very well', Alexandra glared at him. ‘But I shall make my protest very plain when I do see the General. You've no right to delay me!'

‘I dare not let you go, Highness,' he said obstinately. ‘I have my orders and I must obey them.' He saluted her and jumped back on his horse. He shouted instructions to two of his men, and they rode up and turned the horses' heads towards the right, away from the Orcha road. Janos sat motionless without saying a word, and he was not questioned or molested.

At another command the sledge began to move, gathering speed; Valentina looked out quickly and saw the Cossacks wheel and gallop off.

‘They're gone,' she said. ‘Major, you can come out now, but be careful. Two of them are riding ahead as escorts.'