[Marianne 6] - Marianne and the Crown of Fire

by Juliette Benzoni

'But who won?' Jolival demanded, beside himself with impatience.

  The old gentleman gave a sad little smile.

  'We were told it was the Russians. The Tsar had replaced Barclay de Tolly with old Kutuzov, the darling child of victory, and no one ever imagined it could be otherwise. There was even a Te Deum sung in this very place. But the wounded tell a different story. They say that the army is retreating hard on their heels and that Bonaparte is marching on Moscow. Tomorrow or the day after, he will be here. As soon as that became known, all those who could began to leave Moscow. Hence the dreadful confusion throughout the city. Even Rostopchin is going, he has just said so, but for the present he is staying to await Kutuzov whose army must pass through the city to fall back on Kazan.'

  With Jason's stern eye upon her, Marianne succeeded in maintaining her supposed character and remained calm in the face of news which filled her with joy. Jolival, meanwhile, was thanking the old gentleman with exquisite, courtly politeness for his recital and begging him to set the seal on his kindness by recommending an inn, that was, if there were any left open, which would provide them with a roof. This request produced an immediate protest from Jason.

  "There's no call for us to stay here, least of all if Bonaparte is coming! We'd better be gone before nightfall and find ourselves a hostelry of some kind on the road to Petersburg.'

  Monsieur de Beauchamp directed his lorgnette at him and stared for a moment with a mixture of outrage and astonishment at this bearded moujik, evidently a servant, who had the impertinence not merely to venture an opinion but actually to do so in French. Then, apparently considering it beneath his dignity to give the fellow a set-down, the old gentleman merely shrugged his shoulders and, turning his back on him, addressed himself to Jolival.

  'You will never get out of the city tonight. Every street is packed solid with carts and carriages, with the exception of those leading westwards. But there is a chance that you will still find a lodging in Kitaigorod, the walls of which you see before you over there, even if only with—'

  But Marianne was fated never to hear the name of the innkeeper who might have offered them a bed because at that moment something like a huge tidal wave swept into the square and drove like a bullet from a gun straight for the dais on which the governor was still standing, engaged in giving orders to a number of underlings. Several thousand men and women armed with picks and axes and pitchforks and shrieking like famished wolves bore down on the Rostopchin palace. The massive wave broke against its walls with a shuddering impact that swept apart the little group gathered round the old gentleman.

  In an instant Marianne found herself torn from her friends, half submerged in a welter of waving arms, and borne irresistibly back towards the river. Convinced that she had been caught up in a revolt and believing that her last hour had come, she uttered a shrill scream: 'Jason! Help!'

  He heard her. Kicking and righting his way he managed to get to her and grabbed her wrist and together they tried to fight their way against the fierce, undisciplined tide. But it was impossible. Better to let themselves be carried along if they did not want to be thrown down and trampled underfoot, which would have been certain death.

  Without knowing how it happened, the two of them found themselves swept back across the Kremlin bridge and into a small square where a few houses and a church, painted like a theatre backdrop, huddled up against the high walls of a large building with a bright green leaded roof that occupied the river frontage and turned out to be the Foundling Hospital.

  Here there were far fewer people than on the bridge, for the overflow had been diverted along the quays beside the Moskva, and Marianne, gasping and half-suffocated, sank down on a convenient mounting block to get her breath. It was only then that she realized that she was alone with Jason and Shankala. One of the girl's hands, still clutching the privateer's belt, showed clearly how it was that she had been able to keep up with them.

  'Where are the others?' Marianne asked.

  Jason shrugged and waved his arm to take in the square, which was like the crater of a volcano on the point of eruption.

  'In there somewhere!'

  'But we must try and find them—'

  Tired as she was, she was already struggling to her feet ready to launch herself again into the seething mass had he not held her back by main force.

  'Don't be insane! You'd only get yourself killed to no purpose. Think yourself lucky to have got out of that in one piece.' Seeing her eyes begin to fill with tears, he added more gently: 'Craig and Gracchus are well able to look after themselves. As for Jolival, he's no fool. I'd be very much surprised if he came to grief in there.'

  'But what are we going to do? How shall we ever find them?'

  'The best thing is to simply hang around this damned square and wait for them. This little spot of trouble won't last for ever. These people will either leave the city like the rest or go back to their homes. Then all we have to do is to head back to the place where we were separated. The others are certain to do the same. It'd be crazy to go wandering about a strange city at random.'

  What he said made sense, as Marianne readily admitted. She would even have enjoyed the fact of being alone with him, in whatever hysterical circumstances, had it not been for Shankala who was still clinging tightly to Jason and staring fixedly at her without saying a word and with an enigmatic expression in her black eyes. It was as if she had abandoned her own personality and turned herself into a kind of familiar animal, silent but persistent, sticking close to her master's heels.

  'You are quite right,' Marianne said with a sigh. 'We will stay here, then, and wait for things to clear, if they ever do.'

  Certainly, although the crowd in Red Square seemed to be growing calmer and thinning out, access to the bridge was still practically impossible on account of the packed convoys of wounded which had emerged simultaneously from three different side streets. If they had all been on foot the bridge could have absorbed them easily but those able to walk were far outnumbered by the ones being carried on improvised stretchers and there were also a fair number of carts moving along amid the pitiful train from which came a continual groaning intermingled with cries of pain as the injured were jostled by the crowd.

  Here and there a house which happened to be still inhabited opened its door to the wounded but the majority went on towards the military hospital and the two private hospitals on the other side of the river, not far from the Kremlin.

  'We'll never get through,' Marianne said impatiently. 'The riverside is black with people.'

  'Especially since the people in question are soldiers. Look! I can see horsemen over there. Cossacks!'

  His seaman's eyes, accustomed to peering through the worst weather at sea, had picked out the soldiers while Marianne's could still perceive nothing more than a kind of red haze beyond the distant head of the convoy.

  'The Russians must be in full retreat,' Jason went on. "They must be falling back to defend the city. We can't stay here. We're in danger of being trampled underfoot by the horses.'

  "Well, where do you want to go? I'm not leaving here until we've found the others.'

  'I caught sight of an inn in that little square over there. Let's try and get to it. You still have some money on you?'

  Marianne nodded. She had lost her valise, of course. It had been torn from her in the rush. But she had got into the habit of carrying her money and the invaluable podaroshna in an inner pocket of her dress. Even so, she felt reluctant to leave her perch. The inn did not look particularly easy to reach. A man and two aproned women were standing at the door, washing a filthy wound here and offering a cup of wine there to men who paused briefly and went on. The man and his womenfolk were labouring unsparingly, with a warmth and generosity that compelled admiration. Anyone could see that they were ready to give the poor soldiers everything in their house, but Marianne wondered whether their welcome would extend equally to foreign travellers.

  A flung stone, narrowly missing her and breaking a win
dow at her back, made up her mind for her. She jumped up with a cry, but not quickly enough to avoid a splinter of glass which cut her on the forehead just below the hairline. Jason caught her to him and took out his handkerchief to staunch the little trickle of blood.

  'Damned savages!' he fumed. 'Have they nothing better to do than go about breaking their own windows?'

  Marianne had turned round to observe the damage and she pointed wordlessly to the gaily painted signboard, depicting a magnificent cream cake, which announced that at the sign of the Puits d'Amour the brothers Lalonde could be relied upon to supply their clients with the finest pastries in all Moscow, as well as every kind of French sweetmeat from bêtises of Cambrai to bergamotes of Nancy, not forgetting the marzipans of Aix and Agen plums.

  'The surprising thing is that the house is still standing at all,' Marianne said. 'You are right. We'll try the inn. Another minute and it will be too late.'

  They set off again, Shankala still at their heels, and endeavoured to force a passage through to the doorway. A lucky thinning of the stream moving towards the bridge at last allowed them to reach the three outside the inn, whose white aprons were stained by now with wine and blood.

  Marianne spoke to the man.

  'We are travellers from the south. We have come a long way. Can you give us lodging?' she asked, speaking in French but with an attempt to recover her former English accent.

  For an innkeeper, the man did not appear to be very partial to strangers, because he regarded her suspiciously.

  'Where have you come from?' he asked in the same language but with an accent so thick as to be almost incomprehensible.

  'From Odessa.'

  'That's a fair way. What are you? Italian? French?'

  "No, no, English!' she told him quickly, smarting at the necessity for the lie, and also at her lack of success so far. 'I am Lady Selton and these – these people are my servants.'

  The man's attitude relaxed. He was clearly convinced, perhaps less by the title she claimed than by the note of authority in her voice. As an Englishwoman she was entitled to a consideration he would not have granted to a member of any other nation, although he could not find it in him to approve of the passion for travel which seemed to afflict the females of that country. He even managed an apologetic smile as he explained that such few rooms as he had were all taken up with wounded but that if she would be satisfied with a corner of his coffee room he would be delighted to provide her with a fitting meal.

  'Tomorrow,' he said, 'I'll see what I can do to find a more suitable lodging for milady but at least you'll be out of the cold for tonight, and out of the way of the troops coming back into Moscow, who won't be at all fit company for a young lady of quality.'

  'Are they falling back to defend the city?'

  'Why, to be sure they are, milady! Who could ever imagine our little father the Tsar allowing Antichrist to lay his wicked hands on our holy city? I, Ivan Borisovitch, I tell you that great things are going to be happening here and your ladyship will soon see what Russians can do in defence of their sacred soil.' And he added on a note of happy confidence that he had had it from a chasseur that Kutuzov, old Marshal 'Forwards' as they called him, would be in the city before nightfall.

  'But then what was the cause of the uprising in the square just now?'

  'Uprising? What uprising?'

  'I saw it with my own eyes. Just about sunset I was standing outside the governor's palace where a man was being flogged when all at once a crowd of people waving weapons and screaming came rushing this way.'

  Ivan Borisovitch laughed. 'That was no uprising, milady. Simply, news came this morning that the accursed French had reached the monastery of Mojaisk, some twenty leagues from here—'

  Marianne lifted an eyebrow. "Yet another holy place?' she inquired sardonically. But the good man was equally impervious to French irony and to the English sense of humour. He merely crossed himself earnestly several times.

  'Extremely holy, your ladyship! Our good people wanted to go out and meet the enemy and began assembling this morning at the Dorogomilov gate, waiting for the governor to lead them. But they waited all day in vain and then came back to see what could be keeping him. In any case, the arrival of the army would have forced them to turn back.'

  Marianne was careful not to give expression to her thoughts, which were that Count Rostopchin had other fish to fry, his unfortunate chef amongst them, than to put himself at the head of a wild, undisciplined band and ride out with it to meet Napoleon's army.

  Without further comment she allowed him to lead her to a corner of a large, low room without very much light in it. Ivan Borisovitch piled the settles in a corner between two windows with all the pillows and eiderdowns that he could spare and announced that supper would be served immediately.

  The meal, washed down by a wine from the Crimea, was respectable but the night seemed to Marianne the longest she had ever lived through for, despite the cushions, she was unable to get a wink of sleep. Only Shankala, accustomed to lying on the bare ground, slept soundly. Even Jason managed to doze for an hour or two. But Marianne, seated at the window, spent the whole night watching what was happening outside. If she had been in a feather bed she would probably have slept no more because the noise was almost unbearable. All night long, the Russian armies marched past.

  They came in two columns, on either side of the river, the uniforms of chasseurs, grenadiers, hussars and troops of the line alternating with the red and blue tunics of the cossacks and the goatskin caps of the Kalmuks, all advancing in the light of torches. Mounted regiments followed those on foot without undue confusion and the rumble of the guns echoed throughout the city.

  In the smoky light of the torches that flickered over everything, even over the summit of the red walls of the Kremlin, the men's faces looked haggard and weary. Marianne found herself wondering if they had really come to take up a position in the city or whether they would pass fight through, for they all went on along the river as though making for the eastern gates, the very ones by which the enemy would not come.

  All night long, too, Ivan Borisovitch, with his sister and his wife, stood at the door of their house tirelessly offering flasks of wine and mugs of kvass, only as the time went on the fine confidence and eagerness that he had displayed earlier in the evening seemed to crumble and melt away. From time to time he would ask some question of the soldier he was serving and each time the answer left him looking more anxious, with his head sunk a little lower between his shoulders.

  At about four o'clock in the morning, just as the sky was growing light, there was a tremendous explosion somewhere down the river, and a flash so bright that it was as if the rising sun itself had blown up. But it was only the great bridge at the south-eastern corner of the Kremlin exploding in a blinding shower of sparks. It was then that Ivan Borisovitch, his face now grey and drawn, came over and shook Jason where he slept, then spoke to Marianne.

  'I'm very sorry, milady, I am indeed,' he said awkwardly, 'but I'm afraid you'll have to go.'

  'Go?' Jason echoed, once again forgetting his part as the respectable serving man. But the unhappy innkeeper was past the stage of noticing such niceties. He only nodded wretchedly and Marianne could see that there were tears in his eyes.

  'Yes, you must go,' he repeated heavily. 'You must quit Moscow within the hour, milady. You are English and the Corsican ogre is coming. You will be in peril if you stay. Go! Go at once! Such a pretty lady as you are, you must not fall into their filthy hands.'

  'But – but I thought the soldiers were coming to defend Moscow?'

  'No – they are only marching through. They are running away… one of the soldiers told me they are going towards Riazan—' His voice choked suddenly. 'Our army is beaten – beaten! Our city is lost. We are all going, all of us! But you should be gone! We will only put a few things together and be gone also. I've a brother at Kaluga. I shall go to him.'

  'You are abandoning your house?' Jason said. 'But what
about the wounded men in your bedchambers?'

  'They will have to trust in God. It will not help them much if I get myself killed defending them. I've a family to consider.'

  It was no use arguing. The three travellers left and found themselves walking along the riverside, where a state of indescribable confusion reigned. The troops were still passing but now, in amongst them, were all those Muscovites who had stayed at home until that moment but were now leaving precipitately. As they passed the doorway to the foundling hospital they caught sight of a group of children about ten years of age, wearing some kind of green uniform, gathered in the porch about a tall fair man dressed like a superior officer but whose round, pleasant face was running with tears and his fists clenched in helpless rage.

  The anguish of all these people was so real and poignant that Marianne could not help but be touched by it. However you looked at it and whichever side you were on, war was a dreadful thing, a calamity that people might endure but never really wanted, for even such enthusiasm as patriotism engendered was snuffed out like a light at the first real hardship.

  To her awareness of taking part in a tragedy which was not her own was added the anxiety she felt at the thought of her lost friends. If she and Jason went on allowing themselves to be borne along on this flood of humanity they would find themselves outside Moscow, having lost all hope of ever finding Jolival, O'Flaherty and Gracchus again. Possessed by the idea of reaching Red Square and the Rostopchin palace at all costs, they infiltrated a stream of people making for the first bridge across the Moskva in order to be at least on the right side of the river.

  'It must be possible to get to the square by cutting down a side street and going round a little way,' Jason said. 'The first thing is to get free of this mass of soldiers.'

  But the chaos on the other side of the river was even worse and Marianne and Beaufort found themselves suddenly trapped at the corner of another bridge, or rather in the angle between two bridges, because a tributary, the Yaouza, ran into the Moskva at this point and there were bridges across both. The struggling mass of people was equally thick on each. The first rays of the morning sun shining on the Yaouza bridge showed them the figure of Count Rostopchin. Wearing a military greatcoat with huge gilt epaulettes, he was standing with his horsewhip in his hand flailing indiscriminately at all who came within his reach and shouting at them like one possessed to move along. He was doing his best to clear the way and Marianne soon saw why. Coming towards her, surrounded by the cheers and acclamations of the crowd, was a group of generals mounted on magnificent horses.