You know, the advantage to being a wicked bastard is that everyone pesters the Lord on your behalf; if volume of prayers from my saintly enemies means anything, I’ll be saved when the Archbishop of Canterbury is damned. It’s a comforting thought.
So time passed, and Christmas came and went, and I was slipping into a long, bored tranquil snooze as the months went by. And I was getting soft, and thoroughly off guard, and all the time hell was preparing to break loose.
It was shortly before “the old wives’ winter”, as the Russians call February, that Valla’s husband came home for a week’s furlough. He was an amiable, studious little chap, who got on well with East, but the Count plainly didn’t like him, and once he had given us the news from Sevastopol – which was that the siege was still going on, and getting nowhere, which didn’t surprise me – old Pencherjevsky just ignored him, and retired moodily to his study and took to drink. He had me in to help him, too, and I caught him giving me odd, thoughtful looks, which was disconcerting, and growling to himself before topping up another bumper of brandy, and drinking sneering toasts to “the blessed happy couple”, as he called them.
Then, exactly a week after Valla’s husband had gone back – with no very fond leave-taking from his little spouse, it seemed to me – I was sitting yawning in the salon over a Russian novel, when Aunt Sara came in, and asked if I was bored. I was mildly surprised, for she seldom said much, or addressed one directly. She looked me up and down, with no expression on that fine horse face, and then said abruptly:
“What you need is a Russian steam-bath. It is the sovereign remedy against our long winters. I have told the servants to make it ready. Come.”
I was idle enough to be game for anything, so I put on my tulup,o and followed her to one of the farthest outbuildings, beyond the house enclosure; it was snowing like hell, but a party of the servants had a great fire going under a huge grille out in the snow, and Aunt Sara took me inside to show me how the thing worked. It was a big log structure, divided down the middle by a high partition, and in the half where we stood was a raised wooden slab, like a butcher’s block, surrounded by a trench in the floor. Presently the serfs came in, carrying on metal stretchers great glowing stones which they laid in the trench; the heat was terrific, and Aunt Sara explained to me that you lay on the slab, naked, while the minions outside poured cold water through openings at the base of the wall, which exploded into steam when it touched the stones.
“This side is for men-folk,” says she. “Women are through there” – and she pointed to a gap in the partition. “Your clothes go in the sealed closet on the wall, and when you are ready you lie motionless on the slab, and allow the steam to envelop you.” She gave me her bored stare. “The door is bolted from within.” And off she went, to the other side of the partition.
Well, it was something new, so I undressed and lay on the slab, Aunt Sara called out presently from beyond the partition, and the water came in like Niagara. It hissed and splashed on the stones, and in a twinkling the ‘place was like London fog, choking, scalding, and blotting you in, and you lay there gasping while it sweated into you, turning you scarlet. It was hellish hot and clammy, but not unpleasant, and I lay soaking in it; by and by they pumped in more water, the steam gushed up again, and I was turning over drowsily on my face when Aunt Sara’s voice spoke unexpectedly at my elbow.
“Lie still,” says she, and peering through the mist, I saw that she was wrapped in a clinging sheet, with her long, dark hair hanging in wet strands on either side of that strong, impassive face. I suddenly choked with what East would have called dark thoughts; she was carrying a bunch of long birch twigs, and as she laid a hot, wet hand on my shoulder she muttered huskily: “This is the true benefit of the baths; do not move.”
And then, in that steam-heat, she began to birch me, very lightly at first, up the backs of my legs and to my shoulders, and then back again, harder and harder all the time, until I began to yelp. More steam came belching up, and she turned me over and began work on my chest and stomach. I was fairly interested by now, for mildly painful though it was, it was distinctly stimulating.
“Now, for me,” says she, and motioned me to get up and take the birches. “Russian ladies often use nettles,” says she, and for once her voice was unsteady. “I prefer the birch – it is stronger.” And in a twinkling she was out of her sheet and face down on the slab. I was having a good gloat down at that long, strong, naked body, when the damned serfs blotted everything out with steam again, so I lashed away through the murk, belabouring her vigorously; she began to moan and gasp, and I went at it like a man possessed, laying on so that the twigs snapped, and as the steam cleared again she rolled over on her back, mouth open and eyes staring, and reached out to seize hold of me, pumping away at me and gasping:
“Now! Now! For me! Pajalsta! I must have! Now! Pajalsta!”
Now, I can recognize a saucy little flirt when I see one, so I gave her a few last thrashes and leaped aboard, nearly bursting. God, it must have been months – so in my perversity, I had to tease her, until she dragged me down, sobbing and scratching at my back, and we whaled away on that wet slab, with the steam thundering round us, and she writhed and grappled fit to dislocate herself, until I began to fear we would slither off on to the hot stones. And when I lay there, utterly done, she slipped away and doused me with a bucket of cold water – what with one thing and another, I wonder I survived that bath.
Mind you, I felt better for it; barbarians they may be, but the Russians have some excellent institutions, and I remain grateful to Sara – undoubtedly my favourite aunt.
I supposed, in my vanity, that she had just proposed our steam-bath romp to help pass the winter, but there was another reason, as I discovered the following day. It was a bizarre, unbelievable thing, really, to people like you and me, but in feudal Russia – well, I shall tell you.
It was after the noon meal that Pencherjevsky invited me to go riding with him. This wasn’t unusual, but his manner was; he was curt and silent as we rode – if it had been anyone but this hulking tyrant, I’d have said he was nervous. We rode some distance from the house, and were pacing our beasts through the silent snow-fields, when he suddenly began to talk – about the Cossacks, of all things. He rambled most oddly at first, about how they rode with bent knees, like jockeys (which I’d noticed anyway), and how you could tell a Ural Cossack from the Black Sea variety because one wore a sheepskin cap and the other the long string-haired bonnet. And how the flower of the flock were his own people, the Zaporozhiyan Cossacks, or Kubans, who had been moved east to new lands near Azov by the Empress generations ago, but he, Pencherjevsky, had come back to the old stamping-ground, and here he would stay, by God, and his family after him forever.
“The old days are gone,” says he, and I see him so clearly still, that huge bulk in his sheepskin tulup, hunched in his saddle, glowering with moody, unseeing eyes across the white wilderness, with the blood-red disc of the winter sun behind him. “The day of the great Cossack, when we thumbed our noses at Tsar and Sultan alike, and carried our lives and liberty on our lance-points. We owed loyalty to none but our comrades and the hetman we elected to lead us – I was such a one. Now it is a new Russia, and instead of the hetman we have rulers from Moscow to govern the tribe. So be it. I make my place here, in my forefathers’ land, I have my good estate, my moujiks, my land – the inheritance for the son I never sired.” He looked at me. “I would have had one like you, a tall lancer fit to ride at the head of his own sotnia.p You have a son, eh? A sturdy fellow? Good. I could wish it were not so – that you had no wife in England, no son, nothing to bind you or call you home. I would say to you then: ‘Stay with us here. Be as a son to me. Be a husband to my daughter, and get yourself a son, and me a grandson, who will follow after us, and hold our land here, in this new Russia, this empire born of storm, where only a man who is a man can hope to plant himself and his seed and endure.’ That is what I would say.”
Well, it was f
lattering, no question, although I might have pointed out to him that Valla had a husband already, and even if I’d been free and willing … but it occurred to me that he probably wasn’t the man to let a little thing like that stand in the way. Morrison may not have been much of a father-in-law, but this chap would have been less comfortable still.
“As it is,” he growled on, “I have a son-in-law – you saw what kind of a thing he is. God knows how any daughter of mine could … but there. I have doted on her, and indulged her, for her dear mother’s sake – aye, and because I love her. And if he was the last man I would have chosen for her – well, she cared for him, and I thought, their sons will have my blood, they may be Cossacks, horse-and-lance men, grandchildren to be proud of. But I have no grandsons – he gets me none!”
And he growled and spat and then swung round to face me. For a moment he wrestled with his tongue, and couldn’t speak, and then it came out in a torrent.
“There must be a man to follow me here! I am too old now, there are no children left in me, or I would marry again. Valla, my lovely child, is my one hope – but she is tied to this … this empty thing, and I see her going childless to her grave. Unless …” He was gnawing at his lip, and his face was terrific. “Unless … she can bear me a grandson. It is all I have to live for! To see a Pencherjevsky who will take up this inheritance when I am gone – be his father who he will, so long as he is a man! It cannot be her husband, so … If it is an offence against God, against the Church, against the law – I am a Cossack, and we were here before God or the Church or the law! I do not care! I will see a male grandchild of mine to carry my line, my name, my land – and if I burn in hell for it, I shall count it worth the cost! At least a Pencherjevsky shall rule here – what I have built will not be squandered piecemeal among the rabble of that fellow’s knock-kneed relatives! A man shall get my Valla a son!”
I’m not slow on the uptake, even with a bearded baboon nearly seven feet tall roaring at my face from a few inches away, and what I understood from this extraordinary outburst simply took my breath away. I’m all for family, you understand, but I doubt if I have the dynastic instinct as strong as all that.
“You are such a man,” says he, and suddenly he edged his horse even closer, and crushed my arm in his enormous paw. “You can get sons – you have done so,” he croaked, his livid face beside mine. “You have a child in England – and Sara has proved you also. When the war is over, you will leave here, and go to England, far away. No one will ever know – but you and I!”
I found my voice, and said something about Valla.
“She is my daughter,” says he, and his voice rasped like an iron file. “She knows what this means to the house of Pencherjevsky. She obeys.” And for the first time he smiled, a dreadful, crooked grin through his beard. “From what Sara tells me, she may be happy to obey. As for you, it will be no hardship. And” – he took me by the shoulder, rocking me in the saddle – “it may be worth much or little, but hereafter you may call Pencherjevsky from the other side of hell, and he will come to your side!”
If it was an extraordinary proposition, I won’t pretend it was unwelcome. Spooky, of course, but immensely flattering, after all. And you only had to imagine, for a split second, what Pencherjevsky’s reaction would have been to a polite refusal – I say no more.
“It will be a boy,” says he, “I know it. And if by chance it is a girl – then she shall have a man for a husband, if I have to rake the world for him!”
An impetuous fellow, this Count – it never occurred to him that it might be his little Valla who was barren, and not her husband. However, that was not for me to say, so I kept mum, and left all the arrangements to papa.
He did it perfectly, no doubt with the connivance of that lustful slut Sara – there was a lady who took pleasure in her experimental work, all right. I sallied forth at midnight, and feeling not unlike a prize bull at the agricultural show – “’ere ’e is, ladies ’n’ gennelmen, Flashman Buttercup the Twenty-first of Horny Bottom Farm” – tip-toed out of the corridor where my room and East’s lay, and set off on the long promenade to the other wing. It was ghostly in that creaky old house, with not a soul about, but true love spurred me on, and sure enough Valla’s door was ajar, with a little sliver of light lancing across the passage floor.
I popped in – and she was kneeling beside the bed, praying! I didn’t know whether it was for forgiveness for the sin of adultery, or for the sin to be committed successfully, and I didn’t stop to ask. There’s no point in talking, or hanging back shuffling on these occasions, and saying: “Ah … well, shall we …?” On the other hand, one doesn’t go roaring and ramping at respectable married women, so I stooped and kissed her very gently, drew off her nightdress, and eased her on to the bed. I felt her plump little body trembling under my hands, so I kissed her long and carefully, fondling her and murmuring nonsense in her ear, and then her arms went round my neck.
Frankly, I think the Count had under-estimated her horse artillery husband, for she had learned a great deal from somewhere. I’d been prepared for her to be reluctant, or to need some jollying along, but she entered into the spirit of the thing like a tipsy widow, and it was from no sense of duty or giving the house of Pencherjevsky its money’s worth that I stayed until past four o’clock. I do love a bouncy blonde with a hearty appetite, and when I finally crawled back to my own chilly bed it was with the sense of an honest night’s work well done.
But if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and since there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that the treatment should be continued, I made frequent forays to Valla’s room in the ensuing nights. And so far as I’m a judge, the little baggage revelled in being a dutiful daughter – they’re a damned randy lot, these Russians. Something to do with the cold weather, I dare say. A curious thing was, I soon began to feel as though we were truly married, and no doubt this had something to do with the purpose behind our night games; yet during the day we remained on the same easy terms as before, and if Sara grudged her niece the pleasuring she was getting, she never let on. Pencherjevsky said nothing, but from time to time I would catch him eyeing us with sly satisfaction, fingering his beard at the table head.
East suspected something, I’m certain. His manner to me became nervous, and he avoided the family’s society even more than before, but he didn’t dare say anything. Too scared of finding his suspicions well grounded, I suppose.
The only fly in the ointment that I could see was the possibility that during the months ahead it might become apparent that I was labouring in vain; however, I was ready to face Pencherjevsky’s disappointment when and if it came. Valla’s yawns at breakfast were proof that I was doing my share manfully. And then something happened which made the whole speculation pointless.
From time to time in the first winter months there had been other guests at the big house of Starotorsk: military ones. The nearest township – where I’d encountered Ignatieff – was an important army head-quarters, a sort of staging post for the Crimea, but as there was no decent accommodation in the place, the more important wayfarers were in the habit of putting up with Pencherjevsky. On these occasions East and I were politely kept in our rooms, with a Cossack posted in the corridor, and our meals sent up on trays, but we saw some of the comings and goings from our windows – Liprandi, for example, and a grandee with a large military staff whom East said was Prince Worontzoff. After one such visit it was obvious to both of us that some sort of military conference had been held in the Count’s library – you could smell it the next morning, and there was a big map easel leaned up in a corner that hadn’t been there before.
“We should keep our eyes and ears open,” says East to me later. “Do you know – if we could have got out of our rooms when that confabulation was going on, we might have crept into the old gallery up yonder, and heard all kinds of useful intelligence.”
This was a sort of screened minstrel’s gallery that overlooked the library; you got
into it by a little door off the main landing. But it was no welcome suggestion to me, as you can guess, who am all for lying low.
“Rot!” says I. “We ain’t spies – and if we were, and the whole Russian general staff were to blab their plans within earshot, what could we do with the knowledge?”
“Who knows –” says he, looking keen. “That Cossack they put to watch our doors sleeps half the night – did you know? Reeking of brandy. We could get out, I daresay – I tell you what, Flashman, if another high ranker comes this way, I think we’re bound to try and overhear him, if we can. It’s our duty.”
“Duty?” says I, alarmed. “Duty to eavesdrop? What kind of company have you been keeping lately? I can’t see Raglan, or any other honourable man, thinking much of that sort of conduct.” The high moral line, you see; deuced handy sometimes. “Why, we’re as good as guests in this place.”
“We’re prisoners,” says he, “and we haven’t given any parole. Any information we can come by is a legitimate prize of war – and if we heard anything big enough it might even be worth trying a run for it. We’re not that far from the Crimea.”
This was appalling. Wherever you go, however snug you may have made yourself, there is always one of these duty-bound, energetic bastards trying to make trouble. The thought of spying on the Russians, and then lighting out in the snow some dark night, with Pencherjevsky’s Cossacks after us – my imagination was in full flight in a trice, while Scud stood chewing his Up, muttering his thoughtful lunacies. I didn’t argue – it would have looked bad, as though I weren’t as eager to strike a blow for Britannia as he was. And it wasn’t even worth talking about – we weren’t going to get the chance to spy, or escape, or do anything foolish. I’d have given a thousand to one on that – which, as it turned out, would have been very unwise odds to offer.
The Flashman Papers: The Complete 12-Book Collection Page 238