The Mulberry Empire

by Philip Hensher

  The house was odd and ugly and indescribable, but it had opened its great gates to him, once, and closed them now behind him. Where the romance had been in the previous hour, he could not quite say, but there was a distinct whiff of the fairy tale about it. No stranger had walked through those gates for months – no stranger had been admitted by those gates, rather. He could feel it as if he had hacked his way through a hedge of roses. The house had opened, once, mysteriously, to him, and in there was something he had been shown, a riddle he had to solve. He felt that. He had left Bella no more than five minutes before, but now it seemed as if he were looking back at the end of a very long life, at a single pure memory; he felt as if now he could say that it had only been a quarter of an hour, but he had never forgotten it. The transformed girl, the fat girl lying in her panelled warren, buried deep within the dark house. What was she waiting for? What kept her here? The air, in those rooms, was thick with thought, but between him and Bella’s thoughts there was an absolute barrier. For a moment, he had been made to forget his breeches, his discomfort, his country boredom, and had felt like a hero. He had overcome the first tests his quest had presented, and had fallen at the last. Already Stokes wanted to return, but as he rode away, he felt inexplicably that that was something which the house would not permit. The house had appeared, before him, and offered its strange spectacle; if he returned, trying to enter for a second time, it seemed altogether plausible that the park, the palace, the moat, might have disappeared. He rode off, preparing to make his excuses to the waiting Castleford.

  FIFTEEN

  1.

  ON 23 SEPTEMBER, 183—, by the side of the road not many versts from the small Crimean town of—, a gentleman of respectable demeanour but clad in a decidedly rusty black coat and breeches, no longer of middle age, was pacing up and down, and periodically gazing down the empty road to the distant horizon.

  ‘’E won’t come no sooner for you being impatient for ’im, sah,’ his companion observed. This was a sallow and gaunt manservant, well dressed but rather exhausted looking, with sunken cheeks and heavy bags beneath his eyes.

  The landowner made no reply, except to extract from his waistcoat pocket a gold watch, as round as a turnip. Like his clothes, it was made somewhat in the fashion of twenty-five years before. He examined it closely, and then replaced it.

  ‘Patience is a godly virtue, sah,’ the manservant supplied. The gentleman gave a great sigh, and, fanning himself with the back of his hand, went to sit down heavily by the side of his elegant manservant, who confined himself to the habit of turning his garnet ring round his little finger.

  We will leave the gentleman sitting there, while we acquaint the reader with his history, occupation, and character.

  His name is Nikolai Mikhailovich Layevsky. The estate he occupies, of the middle size of a few hundred serfs, is some twenty versts from where he sits, by the side of what the locals loosely call ‘the Moscow road’. Fifty years ago, his father, who was ultimately of the old nobility, moved to the Crimea, then newly taken into the empire, in search of new land. For more generations than he could count, the family of Mikhail Petrovich Layevsky, the father of the present Layevsky, had farmed the earth in the ancient lands of Muscovy, and no Layevsky had ever thought that anything, for his sons and grandsons, would ever be any different.

  The family’s estates had been enough for centuries, but some time in the late eighteenth century, Mikhail Petrovich became troubled by the depletion of his land. Although the estate was large, each time a daughter of the family married, her dowry included a certain number of serfs and a portion of the estate. Mikhail Petrovich grew convinced – he would not assess it, but he was sure – that his estate was no bigger than half what it had been in his great-grandfather’s time. Since this diminishment had come about through no fault or extravagance of his own, but only through his behaving as the head of a family ought to, this was a constant worry to his sense of honour.

  From time to time, Mikhail Petrovich had heard reports about the land to be had in the Crimea; tales of its abundance and beauty, and also reports that vast and fecund tracts of lands could be had for absurdly small sums of money. Mikhail Petrovich was a wise man, who was not easily persuaded by travellers’ tales, but after some years of hearing such stories about the Crimea, he started to believe that they must be true. So in 1786, he sold the handsome Muscovy estates of his ancestors, serfs, lands, orchards and all, and travelled to the Crimea.

  Mikhail Petrovich had, indeed, acquired a large and beautiful tract of land for very little, and since then, he and, after his death, his son, lived there in great happiness. His son and heir, Nikolai Mikhailovich, was only eight years old when he first came to the Crimea. As they came into the country, Nikolai Mikhailovich was not likely to forget his first memory. He had no education or sensibility, but the natural beauty of the country powerfully impressed itself on his ideas. The scent of the forests and fields, carried on the breeze as they travelled along the rough roads, made him close his eyes and try to commit the feeling to memory; the dense border of bird cherries, meadowsweet, cat grass, guelder roses throwing their scent into the warm breeze. When the party stopped, Nikolai Mikhailovich was allowed to drink from the rivers and, once, even to swim while the family and their servants took a rest beneath the wild fruit trees of the region. He always remembered how clear the rivers seemed, however deep they were, so that a white rock on the bed of a river three yards deep seemed to glisten under the hand as if just below the surface.

  The land was as cheap and as plentiful as had been foretold, and Mikhail Petrovich Layevsky easily acquired a substantial and beautiful estate with little trouble. There he settled down with his wife, Agafeya Vasilevna Layevskaya, a modest and benevolent woman, whose keenly felt duties to the poor and the sick never diminished the love she felt for her husband and her three sons, Nikolai Mikhailovich and his two younger brothers, Pavel and Stepan.

  When Nikolai reached the age of eighteen, he was sent to St Petersburg to become a student. The life of the capital did not enchant him; though to us, it may seem that society there is quiet and even somewhat dull, Nikolai Mikhailovich found himself longing for the simple life of the Crimea, and repined for the smell of grass, the song of birds, and the clean taste of the water on his father’s estate.

  Nor did the life of the mind hold much appeal to him, and, when his father died, five years after his departure, he returned home with a sadness in his heart which only masked the relief he felt at taking up a life which was truly his own. He married the daughter of a country neighbour as soon as mourning was at an end, and settled down to a quiet existence, interested only in his voluminous correspondence on agricultural innovations and hearing trivial gossip about his serfs.

  His two brothers took quite different courses in life; Pavel Mikhailovich took up a commission in a Guards regiment, and was killed in the course of 1812. Stepan Mikhailovich was sent to the Corps of Pages at the age of twelve, and, growing up to be a generally agreeable young man, found no difficulty in obtaining a place at court.

  ‘How can Stepan bear such a melancholy fate?’ Nikolai Mikhailovich would lament to his family whenever his brother’s name was mentioned, while the samovar bubbled, and the perfumed pine logs crackled and spat in the fireplace. ‘Ribbons and silk stockings, bowing and precedence!’ Stepan Mikhailovich, who became a great dandy, as devoted to his corset as to his mistress, and was rumoured in St Petersburg not to know a single word of Russian, would certainly have lamented as long and sincerely over the tedious life led by his brother in the depths of the country.

  Thus was Nikolai Mikhailovich’s life for nearly twenty years.

  In 1815, the barley crops failed.

  In 1819, a very dirty and wild-eyed monk appeared from nowhere and lived in a shed for several weeks, until it became apparent that he was preaching sedition to the serfs.

  In 1826, a cow gave birth to a two-headed calf.

  In 1829, influenza took hold of the estat
e, seizing several victims, including Mme Layevskaya, whom Nikolai Mikhailovich genuinely loved.

  A cuckoo may be found in the most remote and secure of nests. When Nikolai Mikhailovich told his eldest son, Pavel Nikolaievich, that his mother had died in the night, the boy stared over the breakfast table at his father, shedding fat tears into his spade-like beard, and said, ‘Then I suppose I must go into the army.’ It stopped Nikolai short; he did not see the necessity at all.

  Pavel Nikolaievich had been named after that heroic uncle, dead in the mud, defending Russia from Napoleon. As soon as he could walk, it appeared that, whether by name or by nature, he was to be a soldier. His favourite occupation while still in skirts was to hoist a branch over his shoulder, in imitation of a gun, and to attempt to drill the chickens, as if on parade ground duty. He never walked when he could march, and rode so early that his swaddling served double duty as his saddle, as the saying goes. Long afternoons were spent in the meadows re-enacting the Battle of Borodino, and amending the conclusion, with the aid of dozens of children from the village. Nikolai Mikhailovich complained regularly about these battles of his son, since they took labour away from the fields, but saw no means of combating Pavel Niko-laievich’s enthusiasm for all things military.

  Upon the death of his mother, Pavel Nikolaievich prevailed in his wish to be a soldier. His application to go into an imperial regiment as a cadet succeeded, since it was supported by his uncle, Stepan Mikhailovich, the court dandy, and Pavel travelled to St Petersburg to pursue his ambition.

  That had been five years before, and now we see Nikolai Mikhailovich, a little older, a little greyer and shabbier, his nose grown big and warty as a pickled gherkin. With his manservant Arkady, he is sitting at the side of the road in September, a third of the way into the century, awaiting Pavel Nikolaievich, returning from his regiment for three weeks’ leave.

  2.

  Heavens, how dull it was! A black-legged hen wandered out from the fields into the road, and started pecking at some piece of dry root, tugging at it without success. Nikolai took his handkerchief out, and mopped his brow; it was hotter than it should be, even at the end of this long summer, and he hoped Pavel Nikolaievich would not be many more hours.

  Arkady rose, stretching himself, and peered down the road. ‘I see something, sah,’ he said at length. ‘I definitely see something approaching.’

  Nikolai got up quickly, and looked in the same direction. He leapt up so sharply that he startled the doves in the trees, which stopped their cooing and rattled off in a flock, into the sky. Yes, that was certainly the coach coming! And with that, all the irritation at being kept waiting dissolved at the anticipation of seeing his fine young son for the first time in five years.

  To stand and wait like this is the strangest of feelings; not far from boredom, and yet not boredom, since your feelings are a turmoil of excitement and worry. Nikolai Mikhailovich stood, his feet tingling, and stared at the road he had known with all his senses for fifty years as if he had never seen it before. But Arkady was right, there was a coach approaching, throwing up a cloud of dust like a cockfight, approaching at half the speed of thought. It seemed forever, but suddenly the coach was within sight, within earshot, and then, all at once, the sharp reek of the sweating horses. Pavel Nikolaievich, a splendid and shining sight in his brilliant imperial uniform, his cloak tossed negligently over his shoulder, leapt down from the tarantass in one easy movement and embraced his father warmly.

  To look at them, the father so dusty and shabby, the son so shining-fresh and handsome, you would have thought that it was the elder who had travelled for two days. But the eager anticipation which precedes a reunion of this sort produces different effects on different people, and, though they had both longed to see each other in very much the same way, Nikolai felt exhausted by his eagerness, just as Pavel’s had rejuvenated him. They held each other at arm’s length, and looked at each other; and then you could see, in the way they both raised their eyebrows, that they were father and son.

  ‘Very pleased to have you back, sah,’ Arkady said.

  ‘Let me introduce you to my friend Vitkevich,’ Pavel said quickly. Nikolai let him go from his embrace, and looked at the long dark figure just now getting out of the tarantass. ‘He has been so good as to travel with me, and is kind enough to stay with us for a week or two, while he is surveying the land hereabouts. I have written to you about him. My friend, Vitkevich, you know, of whom my uncle speaks so well.’

  Vitkevich was a tall young man of saturnine appearance, wearing a stovepipe hat and splendidly flaring whiskers. In a long black travelling cloak, he seemed encumbered by his possessions, and Pavel had gone on talking to allow him time to dismount and assemble himself. He fussily tugged and pulled at his cloak, rearranging it, while all the time giving blunt, unconfident gestures towards the coachman now handing down the dusty wooden trunk, fastened with frayed brown leather straps.

  ‘Mr—’ Nikolai Mikhailovich said. Then he recollected himself. It was true that he was not accustomed to company, and especially not to company with foreign names, but he knew, all the same, how to behave. ‘Mr Vitkevich, I am delighted to make your acquaintance. Did you have a pleasant journey?’

  ‘Wretched, wretched,’ Vitkevich said, gesturing to the coachman. ‘This fellow …’

  ‘Arkady, Arkady,’ Nikolai Mikhailovich said, and his manservant leapt forward to deal with the coachman. Here, in the road, the dust hung, subsided, and the horses, foaming-black and sweating, waited edgily for their water. Nikolai felt terribly tired, and, looking at his son, he realized the cause of the anxiety which had kept him from sleep these last few nights. In the air, a cloud of dust and seed hung in the heavy bright sunlight, as if a thousand old carpets had been taken up and beaten by a thousand beaters. The afternoon resumed its cautious course, disturbed by the wild arrival of the tarantass down the road; the air, quivering a little in the heat, was stirred by the large lolloping of a dark rabbit, venturing back across the road.

  ‘Look, Vitkevich,’ Pavel suddenly said.

  ‘You are here to … my son said …’

  ‘To survey the land,’ Vitkevich said. Pavel beamed, as if proud of his friend.

  ‘You mean to buy land here, then?’ Nikolai said. ‘I may assure you, there is no land in the empire—’

  ‘No, no, sir,’ Vitkevich said, somewhat petulantly. ‘No, I have no plans to buy land. I merely have the intention of surveying it.’

  ‘Vitkevich is deep, papa, deep in the knowledge of agricultural reforms,’ Pavel Nikolaievich added quickly.

  ‘And the question of the serfs,’ Vitkevich said. ‘That is my central subject of interest, to pursue which, your son has so kindly invited me to stay with you for some time.’

  ‘The question of the serfs,’ Nikolai said. ‘Well, sir, you will find us as up-to-date in our farming as any estate in the empire, and our serfs, I dare say, as happy in the lives God has given them to lead as you or I. But you will see for yourself. Now, sir, we must not delay.’

  Arkady bowed with his low, embarrassed bow, not precisely directed at anyone, but beyond the little group.

  The house of the Layevsky estate, Boguslavo, was not at all old; it had been built thirty years before by Nikolai’s father. But it had a restfully traditional air, like the houses of a previous age, and everyone who dwells in such a house finds it calming in every season. A long sinuous road, firmly laid and with well-kept ditches, led from the gates of the estate to the yellow-painted house. On either side of the road, fields of long grass were shimmering gold in the afternoon heat. Peasants greeted the tarantass with a single raised arm and a doff of their caps; they were all clean and healthy looking, well fed and smocked. Their faces had that ruddy flush which only good plain living and a benevolent master may supply. In the air, a sunlit cloud of dust raised by mowing and threshing hung, and the whole scene was bathed in a soft, blurred radiance. To Layevsky, who had not seen his ancestral home for some years, the scene was lik
e a glimpse of heaven. He had spent the previous years confined to St Petersburg, and although he had grown accustomed to look upon the thin, pale, refined sickliness in which the majority of that city’s inhabitants pass their days, he had not forgotten the healthful life of the country and its refreshing beauty. By the road, now, a female serf, plump and pretty, her gold-blonde hair wound up about her head, smiled and waved with all her loose-shouldered arm at the gentry, swaddled up like invalids in their tarantass. In the field behind her, an older man, peacefully binding up the harvest with slow, deliberate movements, broke into song. It was ‘Rushlight’, and others, across the field, took up the tune. A partridge, there, was put up by a scythe, and through the golden-hot afternoon, molten like honey, it flew for safety, its wings going clattering through the air. Pavel shut his eyes for a second, as if hoping to save the afternoon in his mind for ever. It was so beautiful, the day he remembered from his childhood, and so different, and it was only he who had changed.

  ‘Look, Vitkevich,’ he said as the tarantass drove on, not quite knowing what he was urging on his friend’s attention.

  Vitkevich had been sniffing helplessly for some time. It was clear that the atmosphere of Boguslavo affected Layevsky and his friend in quite different ways. ‘To you,’ he said through streaming eyes, ‘this may represent a vista of uncommon beauty. To me, it only represents a hundred opportunities for improvement.’