Little Lost Lambs at the Post

by Harold Lamb

  The great lady spoke as if Ivak did not exist. And Anya slipped in front of him to curtsy. "Ah, Kuraginskaya, to see you here!” she murmured. "Why, like your excellency, a maid in waiting must obey certain commands.”

  "Of course, child. But you are alone?”

  The girl nodded, impish again. Ivak, who wondered what a maid in waiting might be, thought that the boyarina did not relish seeing his Anya appear from the door of Potemkin’s office.

  When they left the slippery dance floor and Anya took his arm, Ivak felt more at ease. The lackeys at the corridor doors bowed, and the sergeant with the cane at the outer door stared and spluttered.

  Ivak felt almost happy when the sergeant saluted and asked, "Has your highborn ladyship a carriage to summon?”

  Anya glanced up appealingly at Ivak. Evidently she did not have a carriage.

  "Wait,” Ivak said, and went to fetch his own horse.

  There was little light where he had tethered the Kabarda, and when he loosed the cord he heard steps moving swiftly behind him. So he squatted and whirled as Tatars do when surprised.

  Flame spat at him with a roar. Drawing his sword, he leaped up, slashing wide. The tip of his blade raked across flesh, and a man cried out. Something crashed away through the bushes.

  Choked with powder smoke, Ivak calmed the frightened horse and swung himself into the saddle. Hurrying to the portico, he dismounted and lifted Anya into the saddle, leading the horse away from the lights while she struggled to smooth out her skirt.

  "I heard something like a pistol shot,” she said after a moment.

  "Yes, it frightened the horse,” he told her. Whoever followed him must have come from the palace, and if so, who but Potemkin would have sent him? It would be the wisest course for Ivak to start out at once for the steppe, without waiting to spend some of his silver at the tavern. He wondered how far he would have to escort this maid in waiting.

  "To the tavern,” she explained, when he asked her.

  This was an old Turkish serai for caravans, where white oxen churned the mud around the carts and Nogai Tatars from the steppe guarded the loads of their camels with drawn knives. In that barnyard stench, lit by log fires and resounding with the songs of soldiers and rivermen who drank at the vodka stand, Anya Graeme had a cubicle to herself on the brick platform against the courtyard wall.

  "Eh, tell me,” he asked curiously. "What is a maid in waiting?”

  Her blue eyes searched his face, and she nodded. "First share my bread and salt. Then I will tell you, Cossack.” Now Ivak had meant to be in the saddle of the Kabarda by then. Yet Anya sent her moujik for the tavern samovar, spreading out the quilt for Ivak to sit on with her. With her shawl warming her bare shoulders, she looked fragile, easily to be broken, as she explained that her father, the Scottish gentleman, had died, leaving her alone with the servants. He had been something called a royalist, a refugee from his country.

  "Aye, so,” assented Ivak, relishing the hot tea because she poured rum from a bottle into his glass. "Times are when a Cossack also has to mount and ride from his country.”

  Looking at him, she explained that many Scottish and English gentlemen also served the Empress, hoping to win estates and perhaps settle down to raise their families. She said nothing of her mother, who must have been Russian. Friends had taken her into service at court, where she helped dress the noble ladies and waited upon them in public. In that way she was a maid in waiting.

  Like a servant, Ivak thought. "Doesn’t your lover help?” he asked curiously. "The fellow you love?”

  "I have not seen him yet.” She looked at Ivak gravely. "Was not that bullet fired at you?”

  When Ivak nodded, she said quickly, "I thought so. Because you heard the orders his h—— a certain person gave me. It is dangerous, Ivak, to be near me at this time. Don’t you know that? Please go away from Kherson quickly.”

  That Ivak fully intended to do. Still, he began to think about Anya—how beautiful she was, and alone. "Will you come?” he asked.

  She laughed, the shadows going out of her eyes. "No. How can I? But you can. Never mind what a certain person told you to do. You have a fine horse, Ivak. Use him.” With that, she held out her hand like a boy.

  "May the devil fly away with certain people,” he grumbled. "There’s a time to ride and a time to carry the saddle. Your old servant is good only to chase flies. You sleep, Anya, maid in waiting. I’ll watch the door.”

  She smiled up at him, impish again. "Good! I wanted you to stay, Ivak.”

  That was how Ivak came face to face with Nick—Nick McRae. For he stepped out to the brandy barrel to drink before sleeping, and found his way blocked by angry rivermen who were pulling at the arms of a foreign lad. Ivak had not seen his like before—curly-haired, with a long, merry face and a lank body draped in shining broadcloth such as merchants wore. Ivak waited, because the rivermen were hot with brandy and yelling for their pay. The twenty-year-old boy held only a leather-bound book between his fingers, and made no move to defend himself. He had no guards with him.

  Suddenly he swung himself up to sit on the counter, and opened his coat to show a heavy money belt and, Ivak noticed, a pair of silver-chased pistols. When the boatmen fell silent to stare, he scolded them. "Listen, brothers of dogs. Here’s your gold in my belt. You will have it all as I promised when the last barge is unloaded tomorrow.”

  At that, the boatmen began to shuffle their feet and argue among themselves, no longer dangerous. Ivak shoved through them for his brandy.

  As he tossed down the first glass, Nick McRae said, "Cossack, who is the lady with you?”

  Ivak thought about his answer. "Health to you, young master,” he said, filling his glass. "She’s a darling of One-Eye.”

  That would have silenced a Russian from the north, but this Nick laughed, taking some corn brandy himself. "Here? With you, Cossack? No, Potemkin’s darlings travel in style. I asked who is the lady.”

  At another time Ivak might have thought about getting a touch of the gold in the stranger’s belt. Now, with the brandy warming him, he thought only of protecting little Anya, who depended on him alone. "Eh,” he said, "I have eaten her bread and salt. Who are you, to ask?”

  Nick smiled over his glass. On the morrow, he said, he would be a free man, with the last of his cargo delivered. When Ivak glanced at the great bales, he explained that his goods were lead and wool blankets and such—not his, but the goods of the owners in a place called Edinburgh.

  So he was not a merchant, only a merchant’s agent, who had brought the bales through the mud of the spring thaw, through river robbers and plundering Tatar bands and bribe-hungry post-service officials, down to the army depot on the flooded Dnieper, where the cargo could be sold at double value.

  "Bless you, Master Nick,” said Ivak after their third glass. "Why not keep the gold in your belt and sell the stuff for yourself? ”

  That was how merchants did. "Chelom vam,” grinned Nick, "a good thought that has come to me often. But I want a fortune out of Russia . . . or nothing at all. Who is the lady?”

  Remembering how he had bullied the boatmen, Ivak believed Nick might win his fortune. "This lady,” Ivak told him, "has nothing at all—no father or lover or protector or money of her own.”

  "Except for you, sotnik.”

  "Aye, so.”

  Long after Ivak had kicked the servant away from where the man snored, wrapped in a blanket, at Anya’s door, and had stretched out to sleep there himself, he heard a quiet footfall. Nick stood over him, to stare down at him and depart silently.

  Whereupon Ivak roused himself to spy upon the courtyard below. Although even the brandy drinkers were wrapped in their sheepskins by then, Nick sat on the bales reading his book. He did not trust other eyes to watch for him.

  The Scot was gone with his boatmen and gear by daylight, when an ensign of hussars jangled his spurs up to Anya’s door, shifted his fur-edged pelisse on his shoulder, said, "God be with you,” and, "Pavel will
land at the new pier where the wounded wait, before noon. Be there.”

  It was like the flick of a whip. For the last hours Ivak had forgotten the man named Pavel whom Anya had been ordered to cling to and entrap. The ensign closed one eye, laid a finger against it and jangled off.

  Ivak bethought him that Pavel must be a foreigner and high in rank, but when he tried to question Anya, he found her busied with needle and thread, sewing a lace collar on a velvet dress.

  "Who might the brawling lad be,” she asked, biting the thread, "he who drank with you in the night?”

  So she had been watching the two of them. "A Scot,” Ivak warned her, "who has a devil in him.”

  Why did the girl smile, and linger to wash her linen gloves in water from the samovar? Nay, she put on a hat with a red feather and rode down to the river as if to a wedding feast. Yet in Potemkin’s office she had shrunk within herself at mention of Pavel and her mission.

  For Ivak, the omens were bad that morning. The Kabarda stumbled in the mud. A swamp mist hung about them. In that mist echoed the camel bells, the tread of a marching column, heard but not seen. Their horses flinched at rows of wounded men, huddled in the rushes of the shore waiting for transport. Although it was the first day in June, these wounded coughed and shivered in the cold.

  Look as he would along the pier, he could see no sign of an officer who might be Pavel. Seated on a bench with a quartermaster colonel, Nick McRae was paying off the last of his men as his goods were loaded from a barge into the waiting carts. This colonel played with a silver snuffbox as he signed papers for the Scot. And even in the gray light, jewels sparkled in the silver of the box.

  Ivak noticed it because when the colonel went away, staring at Anya as he passed, he left the snuffbox on the bench by Nick. A moment later it had disappeared from the bench, and Ivak guessed that the box held money that sweetened the bargain for Nick.

  No sooner had the snuffbox vanished than Nick strode over to them and swept off his hat, asking if he might be of aid to the lady. Was she not waiting for a ferry?

  Dignified as a boyarina, the girl leaned against a pile, thanking him courteously, explaining that she needed no aid. The lad touched her wrist where gleamed a bracelet with a miniature shield of arms.

  "The Graemes of Garvock!” he nodded. "My neighbors.”

  Then he spoke in a lilting tongue strange to Ivak, and she answered. This Nick, who had spent seven of his twenty years on the great seas, had been born in mountains called the West Highlands. Now, with his duty done and the receipt for his cargo in his pocket, he had not a care in the world except to return home.

  Ivak watched him closely when he examined the shield on the bracelet. Cristabel Anastasiya Graeme, he knew, could not leave Russia; she had this shield of arms and a place at court with the great ladies, but she had to stay and serve where she was. She had to serve the Empress.

  Ivak heard the name "Pavel” spoken. Anya wished Nick McRae Godspeed on his journey, explaining that she was waiting to greet Pavel.

  "Another general, Miss Graeme?”

  "No.” She smiled, looking past him into the mist. Although she had wanted Ivak to help her, she was proud in refusing aid from the boy, her fellow countryman. "Pavel Jones, the new admiral.”

  The rank of admiral did not abash Nick. "You have so many admirals here. Let me see. Not Nassau-Siegen, and not de Ligne. Why, you mean Paul Jones.” He laughed impulsively. "The pirate and bravado who raided Kirkudbright and carried off Lady Selkirk’s plate. The fellow who’s angling for a new command in Paris.”

  Anya stiffened. "He has one, Mr. McRae, signed by Her Majesty . . . Hush, or the Yankee will hear you.”

  The bark that had drifted in through the mist scraped against the piles. Ivak sighted the uniforms of officers on its deck, and a tarantas—a light traveling carriage with a pair of horses harnessed to it—and he thought that because of the flood the tarantas had abandoned the muddy roads to make speed on a ship.

  Then Anya held out her hand. "Good-by, Mr. McRae, of the West Highlands. I assure you that you can do nothing for me.” When he stood his ground, her eyes half closed as if in pain, and she said suddenly, "Please.”

  On the bark, some of the crew and a tired lieutenant were struggling to get the horses, which smelled the shore, on planks over the rail to the pier. Nick jumped on the rail. "Pigs’ heads!” he shouted. "Get the harness off those horses! Lift over the carriage wheels yourselves!"

  When he gripped the rein of a horse, Ivak ran to help him. The beasts would have broken their legs in their fright. Truly, Nick had a way of handling men.

  A clear voice rang through the confusion, "Marsch!”

  March! It sounded like a command, and Ivak glanced at the man who had stood by quietly, slight and short, in a weathered blue cape.

  No sooner were the horses over the rail and the crew heaving at the carriage than Nick went to greet the man in the cape, calling him "Excellency” and "Chevalier Jones.” And Anya curtsied to him.

  So this was the new Yankee admiral, weary and mudstained, with a streak of gray in his unpowdered hair. An old man—perhaps as old as forty years.

  When Anya smiled up at him, this Paul Jones bowed to her and made compliments in English. Yet his gray eyes quested along the pier, as if he were disappointed that a bevy of officers had not waited there to greet him.

  "Forward!” grumbled the lieutenant who served as Jones’ interpreter. "Always forward, he says. Nine hundred versts we came from Petersburg to this accursed river in thirteen days. Nay, he does not know the word for sleep.”

  Ivak checked a grin, for the fast journey that had stupefied this officer of the Guards would have been no hard ride for a Cossack. "What language does he speak, then?” he asked curiously.

  "Scottish!”

  Again a chill of foreboding touched Ivak, the sotnik. Here at the far frontier of the empire an all-seeing eye had picked out three foreigners, Scottish by birth, and some unseen power had brought them together—to do what? Or had Nick forced himself upon the two others? For he was making himself useful, getting the Yankee’s valise ashore, while Anya chatted merrily, as if it were the greatest good fortune to meet the admiral whom she had been ordered to betray.

  "Hurry, Ivak,” she called. "Isn’t the tarantas ready? We mustn’t keep the admiral standing or Potemkin waiting.”

  Ivak did not hurry, except to step quickly behind the carriage. Trotting hoofs thrummed on the pier, and through the thinning mist showed a half squadron of hussars, with a bevy of high officers and the burly Prince Marshal in uniform with ribbon and star on a fine black horse.

  Word of Jones' landing must have reached him. For, reining his horse forward, he shouted gleefully, "The famous Jones! Bless us, this is a fortunate hour!”

  "What does he say?” cried Paul Jones. "Repeat!”

  He must have guessed that the Marshal of the empire had come to greet him. In his bow he drew back his cape, disclosing the gleam of gold on the hilt of the sword of honor at his belt, and the ribbon of a Chevalier of France at his throat. Before the startled interpreter could step forward, Nick came between the two and explained Potemkin’s greeting to Jones. As a matter of course, he interpreted Jones’ answer, "The Chevalier Jones agrees that the hour is fortunate for him when he takes command of your highness’ fleet.”

  It seemed to Ivak that Potemkin hid his surprise at the Scot’s action. Certainly the Marshal showed no recognition of Anya, whom he must have expected to be there. By every word Potemkin showed that the new admiral had his favor. "We will give the famous Jones opportunity to display the qualities for which he is famous. Bless us, there’ll be no waiting now. Only let him act boldly. Let him ask for anything—munitions, men, anything—he needs. He shall have it.” Then he called upon a Frenchman, introduced as Prince de Ligne, to attend Jones.

  Flushed with excitement, holding his head higher, Jones listened to the compliments of de Ligne, who vowed that never did a fleet need a commander so much as this
of theirs at the river mouth.

  In turning to leave, Potemkin touched Nick’s shoulder and spoke to him softly. "What is your name? Nicholas? Well, Nicholas, you are clever. Can you be useful also? ” His stubby fingers felt in his belt, and gripped Nick’s hand. "A remembrance,” he whispered, "that it pays to be useful as well as bold.”

  His good eye rested an instant on Ivak. Then he jerked at his horse and was off with his escort. Not once had he spoken to Anya.

  Released for the moment from his interpreting, Nick drew a long breath and laughed, showing Anya something in his hand. Ivak heard her say, "Speak Russian; you must.” Glancing swiftly at de Ligne, she nodded. "Yes, Nicholas, you have done well for yourself.”

  In his hand he held the tawny diamond that Ivak had examined on Potemkin’s table. "A strange crystal,” Nick said.

  "If it were a diamond, Nicholas, what would you do with it?” Anya asked.

  "If! God willing, I would charter me a flat-bottomed bark and fare forth with her.”

  "Where? With whom?”

  Nick smiled. "Why, to the sea lochs of the West Highland shore, with never an owner to bid me go or stay. I’d follow only the stars in their courses, Anya.”

  Unconsciously he took her hand, twisting his fingers through hers, thinking of a distant sea. A boy like that would always be dreaming and faring forth to seek new things. Anya half closed her eyes. "It is a diamond, and Potemkin knows its value. Do you?”

  "A thousand florins or nothing!” Nick threw back his head, intent. "A third ownership in the bark I want.”

  "Have you never spoken to him before?”

  "Not I!" Nick had eyes only for the gleaming stone. "You’ve brought me luck, Anya.”

  "Nick! Take it and go to your ship. Don’t stay and hope for more.”

  "Eh? And turn against my luck? Why? Tell me.”

  "You don’t need to be told.” She hesitated, looking into his eyes. "Potemkin heard you interpreting for the new admiral. A diamond is nothing to him, but he would like to know all that the Chevalier Jones says, and to whom.”