Gentleman Jack

by Katy Derbyshire

  After this jaunt, Anne Lister could barely wait for their departure. Ann Walker, however, was in the dumps – AL tries not to notice. Upon which Ann Walker resorts to utter silence, which infuriates AL – ‘this not speaking I cannot bear,’35 Phyllis Ramsden quotes Anne Lister in her excerpts of the coded passages. Ann did not want to go along but still had a fur hat and coat made. Undeterred, Anne obtained the necessary passes and purchased the final provisions: candles, tea and sugar, a samovar and a lantern. Ann succumbed to her fate. They stored everything they did not take along in their travelling carriage, in Mrs Howard’s coach shed. Anne exchanged Hammersley bills of credit for roubles at a Moscow bank. She was warned she would not be able to access her money by this means south of Astrakhan. During the night before their departure, Anne and Ann wrote a number of personal and business letters, knowing it would be a long time before they could do so again. Princess Radzivill received a note. Following confidential talks with her, Anne had weighted up the pro & contra36 of an affair. They parted with tears in their eyes; travelling would be unsupportable if one had often the pain of partings like this.37

  FROM MOSCOW TO THE CAUCASUS

  They left Moscow on 5 February 1840. To make fast progress, they stopped only to change horses during the first forty-eight hours. Only just snow enough for us, the well-broken rubble of the road visible on my side. That was to remain the case until Astrakhan, as the mild weather bringing a fair amount of snow had been followed by a bitterly cold spell. Despite -18 °C daytime temperatures, Anne left the window open on her side – because it steamed up otherwise and she could not see the countryside. When they had to slow to walking pace, she even opened the door. After a good four days and 280 miles, they arrived in Nizhny Novgorod (known from 1932 to 1992 as Gorky) at one in the morning, sleeping in their usual night-things for the first time, again at an inn.

  Nizhny is beautifully and picturesquely situated along the crest of the high ground and creeping down the slope, as it were in terraces, to the river, the Oka, that flows into the Volga; how fine the junction of these two noble rivers. Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Countess Panina, the governor general invited them to dinner and provided them with the use of a calash carriage, with which Anne and Ann explored the town and the grounds of its famous fair. 2,635 shops in stone and, as was said later at the General Governor’s, 2,600 in wood, where goods from all over the world were sold for a month in summer, from raw materials to luxury items; the length of the Dvor is just one English mile, and a person going into every shop, and not going out of his way, will have walked 40 English miles at the end of his journey! Extraordinary town of little shops!1

  From Nizhny, they continued along the frozen Volga, following its course almost to its mouth on the Caspian Sea. Pass several large wooded islands in the river and drive close under the shipping of several little frozen-up ports. The Volga was not yet controlled in 1840. Low hills ranged along its right bank. On its left bank, known as the meadow bank, prior to the construction of some two hundred reservoirs beginning in the 1930s, the Volga had no clearly defined bed in many places, sometimes flooding up to twelve miles during the spring thaw. Anne was not always certain whether they were travelling on ice or frozen earth. Impossible to write while we are going on account of the motion and occasional big jolts. Could not write more than necessary at the station, too cold, my fingers began to ache. Anne measured Réaumur -14° (-17.5 °C) in the doorway of the kibitka at 3:17 pm.2 A day later, the thermometer fell to -37.5 °C and Anne broke two of the three windowpanes in their coach with her numb hands.

  Travelling on the river had its dangers. On one occasion, slumbering, and asleep till roused about 5 by a stoppage. Put my head out to ask if it was the station – nobody answered, all flat and snow, no house. But soon the plunging of the horses in water and the noise of the men and the breaking of ice shewed that our ‘station’ was on the bursting ice of the Volga! Luckily Ann was not apparently aware of danger. The servants’ kibitka (always following ours) had avoided the bad place and was standing on firm ice twenty or thirty yards to the right and ahead of us. We were sufficiently near to the right bank, luckily, to be not over deep water. One of our horses sunk almost over his head – I think his feet were on the ground. Luckily the ice on which the carriage rested did not entirely give way so as to let water get inside. Gross came to us and advised our not getting out as he had got up to his knees in water. We took the servants’ horses and were at last after ten minutes or more skewed round onto firm ice, and pushed our way without further upset.3

  They arrived in Kazan on 15 February, ten days after leaving Moscow. Then as now, most of the city’s population were Tatars with small dark eyes and a sharpish-looking countenance and dark complexion, quite different from Russians.4 Here too, high society took care of the two Englishwomen, who were invited to dinner, taken to the theatre and shown around the university. The Orientalist Alexander Kasimovich Kazembek, who was to number a young Leo Tolstoy among his students four years later, obtained a very special invitation for Anne and Ann. They first visited a mosque, then adjourned to the house of the Tatar honey-merchant Arsayeff, not the richest here, but very good and much respected and rich – 4 wives. Only saw one son, a nice enough boy of 7 or 8. Three tables groaned under different species of pastry and confectionery, then a regular Tatar dinner. A pilaff of rice and little bits of meat, roast mutton, roast turkey in pieces (though the Tatars never cut anything up, eat with their fingers), cold fish, etc. After this the ladies were shown into the harem – the 4 wives and a daughter and niece or two and 2 or 3 women servants, about 12 altogether. Richly dressed in brocade and ornamented with pearls, turquoises, even diamonds. The youngest wife rather pretty, rouged cheeks and blackened teeth. At first the women were all for running away but they were soon reassured. Poor things! So many human beings human animals! Except an asylum for insanes I have never seen any sight so melancholy and so humiliating as this harem. They are not admitted or capable of being admitted into society – how terrible the degradation of one half mankind!5

  19 Anne Lister’s and Ann Walker’s journey through tsarist Russia in 1839–40, Laura Fronterré.

  Their next main stop was Saratov, almost 430 miles away. It became more difficult to get good horses at the postal relay stations and their accommodation grew more and more basic. The windows were made of ox gut and the beds – as Count Panin had warned them in Moscow – were full of bedbugs and fleas. It was no more comfortable in their coach, however. Several attempts to replace the broken windows failed. Cold wind, today the most winterly we have had. Till the courier put the mat he sat upon against our front window (still unglazed) we were covered with the flying snow – not snow falling from the heavens, but the snow from the ground, a regular blizzard by a strong south-westerly wind sweeping over this high plain. Can’t see 20 yards before us, the atmosphere so obscured by the driving snow. They passed the barrier to Saratov at 1:11 in the afternoon of 28 February 1840. Despite their six-day journey through the cold, they felt no inclination to warm up in their good-looking inn. Impatient to look about us, they went straight out to explore. The lively market in the busy trading town kept them well amused, too much so for Ann to complain of being cold or tired.6

  They reached their next stop on the Volga, Sarepta, some 250 miles distant, within forty-eight hours. There, they came across Kalmyks, nomadic Mongolians of Tibetan Buddhist faith. Anne and Ann visited a family in their yurt. The floor was literally a ground floor, the little fire in the centre, the smoke escaping through the circular opening of perhaps 2 ft. in diameter. [...] The people in dirty shubes [wool caftans], women, too, the latter only distinguished by their gold ear-rings and long black hair in two long tresses reaching down to the hips. [...] The faces of the people resembling all the drawings I have seen of the Mongolian – small, dark, rather sunk eyes, highish cheekbones and rather tapering chins, smoke-brown complexions, good white teeth. I thought the people, dirty as they were, so much less ugly
than I had expected that I asked our cicerone to tell one of the women I thought her handsome – she grinned her satisfaction.7

  The people Anne scrutinised with such abandon stared back with no less curiosity. The less familiar the surroundings were to the Englishwomen, the more they themselves stood out. The people coming in to look at us as if we were some strange animals such as they had not seen the like before. They came across people more Finn-like, and broader faces and stupider looking. 20 or more men and boys and as many women and girls about us in a few minutes, quite a throng, all trying to get a peep at us.8 Some Kalmyks became so intrusive that Anne and Ann had to block the door to their room with a table and suitcase; at the window, they made a screen of two chairs piled with our clothes. The next morning, though, just beginning to dress when their curiosity could hold out no longer and they gently opened our folding doors and peeped in at these and the windows till we sat down to breakfast at 8:55. In fact children or grown people stood looking at us all the time we stayed.9

  Thanks to a letter of recommendation from Professor Kazembek, the Kalmyk monarch Prince Cerbedjab received the two women at his winter residence in Tumen. Remarkably good countenance, an agreeable, good-looking, stoutish, gentlemanly man, his manner easy and prepossessing. Moderately Mongol as to features, but the ladies decidedly the very type of Mongolian. One of these was a celebrated Calmuck beauty. They sat in the salon, furnished in European style with oil paintings of the tsar and tsarina above the sofa. George translated from Russian. The prince talked about the Kalmyks and his family, clearly proud of his descent from Ghenghiz Khan. His only obligations were to recognise the sovereignty of the tsar and to provide military service in times of war. Prince Cerbedjab had headed a regiment of his Calmucks at the siege of Leipzig and been in Paris with Tsar Alexander. One of his cooks had trained there too, and prepared a feast for Anne and Ann complete with French wines, just like chez un prince Européen. To finish off, they had two excellent cups of tea, the best I have tasted in Russia.

  In Tumen, Anne and Ann visited a school and a temple built by Prince Cerbedjab. A nice lively Russian woman took care of Anne. The lady took me by the arm and seated herself by me in the smaller sledge. She put her arm round me to hold me safe if there was any little jolt, I covered her gloveless hands with my cloak and we were very good speechless friends. The village consisted of tents and huts. They are Russianising. What Anne considered the only Buddhist temple in Russia received them with its square tower over four tapering storeys, very Chinese. [...] The thundering music, the din of drum and trumpet, commenced as we reached the steps. For the two exotic guests, twenty-one priests in yellow with shaved heads performed a ceremony, accompanied by eighteen musicians, all in long gowns, silk-embroidered flowered rich silk, but much worn, and a cap of black silk flowing halfway down the back. As a parting gift, Prince Cerbedjab gave them a Mongolian grammar book; Anne was surprised that such a man could still be pagan – could still revere Budda [sic] as his prophet, and the grand lama of Tibet as a divine incarnation! 10

  The Lower Volga was home not only to Kalmyks, but also to Germans. Catherine the Great had invited them to colonise the fertile but sparsely populated territory some eighty years previously. Anne felt almost at home and was pleased to see many a good tidy German village. In the neat little comfortable, well-built, partly stone, partly board town of Sarepta, their servant Gross asked a fellow German to show them around. People are not rich here, but live very well. They have no taxes to pay, are free of everything. The clock-and-watch-maker here gains a very good living – the coppersmith, the baker, the everybody. Plenty of work. They bought nightcaps from weavers, their innkeeper explained the clever system behind his cooling room, and they denigrated the backward methods of the Russian farmers compared with those of their German counterparts. Anne regretted my own German is not yet beyond a few words of speaking and about twice as many of understanding. They enjoyed the German food as well; good cinnamoned soup with tender chicken in it, pigeons cut in two and nicely done – they passed for game with Ann – and potatoes browned in the dish with the birds. And a salad, very pretty and good, dressed with vinegar and sugar, red and white cabbage cut in very fine shreds and well mixed half and half. Think of this for a pretty salad at home. And an excellent little dish of rice browned and cinnamoned over. Preserved plums and apples to eat with the birds, of which we had three – ate two and put one away in our casserole. The only thing they were not impressed by was the German windows – very cold last night – because instead of the good Russian fashion of double windows, these single concerns let in an air that would turn a mill! 11

  A month of icy wind at the open coach window had brought Anne a bad cold and a case of conjunctivitis. After a day’s bed rest with the Germans in Sarepta, she braced herself against the wind for another five days for the last stage of their journey on the Volga, seldom out of foot’s pace, the snow thickish, [...] the most terrible crawl we have had. Where the wind had blown the snow away, they discovered a wide expanse of bare red sandy ground. They had reached the steppe. Approaching vehicles of goods from the Caspian Sea were the only distraction. The large fish filling a sledge is the balouga, the tail sticking out behind.12 They arrived in Astrakhan on the evening of 12 March 1840.

  There was not a single inn there. Anne turned to the chief of police, who offered us his house for the night. He spoke a little French – thankful!13 The next day, George Tchaikin found them accommodation with a Belgian tailor who had taken part in Napoleon’s Russian campaign, been taken prisoner and ended up marrying a Volga German woman. Although the town and neighbourhood boast not of beauty,14 they stayed ten days, exhausted as they were by crossing 1,500 miles in exactly five debilitatingly cold weeks. AW tired and out of temper.15 Anne, still very ill with her cold, had to stay in bed. Asked about her impressions of travelling in Russia, she answered: Everything interests me – everywhere is good – no disparagements for me. Sleep well on the floor and care not about the floors, whether this or that, so far. Ann finds them dirty, and compared them at a discount with the Inns of England. Unfair. I neither do this to the Russians or to myself. Considering the real state of civilisation among the various peoples of Russia and how little the higher orders travel in their country or know it, it is more wonderful to have the comforts, the facilities we have than that any should be wanting.16 Their servant Gross did not agree. He asked for his dismissal and Anne and Ann had to let him go.

  Eventually, their coach was repaired and put on wheels. George and Domna Tchaikin got a new kibitka. They replenished their supplies and paid for the pass to Tbilisi – 125 roubles for 550 miles. The tsar made good money out of permission to travel: six people could stay in an inn for eight roubles a night, but the travel pass didn’t cover accommodation. That had to be paid for separately, along with the expense of the horses and coachmen. They set out on 22 March. All sandy mud and steppe. We soon after leaving Astrakhan left the Volga, to see it no more.17 They spent fourteen days struggling across boggy ground against the still strong wind and came across a new and worse kind of postal station, where not even a samovar simmered away. Well, we have our spirit lamp so we have had English tea very comfortably. No cream here, not much water – nothing but the room.18 From Kizlyar, a dirty, muddy place with low shabby unpainted houses,19 they followed the course of the Terek River for the next 370 miles or so to the main ridge of the Greater Caucasus. Aside from military men, they saw no more Russians. In completely mud-ridden Mozdok, they received their first armed escort. Our 2 Cossacks very picturesque, very dexterous. Threw down their caps and picked them up at a gallop, as also sticks. Played in this way till their poor sorry-looking horses were quite in a heat. When they were initially refused an escort at the next station because a paper was missing, Anne charged one of my pistols and we drove off with 5 horses each.20

  In Yekaterinogradskaya – mud worse even than at Mozdok – there was no escort to be had; attacks by Cherkess further south meant all the military fo
rces were occupied, so the local commander simply forbade Anne and Ann from travelling any further. That gave Anne a day of rest on her forty-ninth birthday. She and Ann drove out before the town’s gates and enjoyed their first view of the Greater Caucasus. At 2:10 how fine! Magnificent snow-covered granite? range. Rugged, peaky, raviney.21

  While Anne could hardly wait to get there, her partner felt less anticipation. The postal courier did not want to go with them, shammed illness, and would have left us at Ekaterinograd if I would have given him his passport. But Anne needed every one of her men to cross the mountains, and the courier had to stay. George, tho’ he shared the servile fear, never breathed a wish or thought to leave us; and, considering his coward-company, this did him great credit. Domna, the little femme de chambre began gradually to recover itself,22 and Ann was not asked her opinion. Anne put together a private escort of four armed Yekaterinogradskaya men on horseback, and they set off.

  Only a few miles along, they passed a quarantine station for those travelling in the other direction, where if one has not a bill of health from the Governor further south one has to pass 14 days. In Alexandrovskaya, the Englishwomen met a Russian officer travelling alone, who was going to Tiflis and will be glad to travel in our train! The next morning they received an escort from four Cossacks. Along the way, the coachman suddenly shouted Tcherkess! and brought the coach to an abrupt halt. Anne and Ann spotted numerous horsemen out of their windows. Our Cossacks prepared for fight. I got out and reprimed my one loaded pistol. The Tcherkess, all apparently well mounted, wheeled round (I counted about 20) to the back of us and drew up on the rising ground behind us to the right. I concluded they were preparing for a regular cavalry charge down upon us – their halt was to me a moment of anxiety. But the horsemen hesitated. We drove on foot’s pace, faster, nothing beyond a bit of trot now and then, we could not go. Both our doors were open. I mentally counted our strength – 4 Cossacks, 4 drivers, a Russian officer and his servant and drivers who had come along with us, a teleaga with a man or two, the courier and George and ourselves. I thought we could make a tolerable fight. I felt not the least afraid, nor did Ann. After tense minutes, Anne noted, they hesitated – they rode off.23 The party reached Vladikavkaz a day later, on 6 April.