Polonaise (56 page)

They seemed harmless enough – boys rather than men and for an anguished moment he wondered if they could be brothers of one of his dead pupils. He tiied so hard not to think of them, not to remember how he had failed them.

‘We've come to offer our services, lord, for your journey.' The leader doffed his furred cap to reveal cropped dark curls.

‘Good God! I'd know your voice anywhere, but you had me fooled for a moment.' He turned to Marylka. ‘You too! Amazing.' He was more relieved than he cared to admit. Accepting the suggestion that Jenny and Marylka pass as boys, he had wondered what chance the disguise had of succeeding. ‘But you're to be Poles?'

‘Yes.' Jenny smiled at him. ‘The loose tunic makes a much better disguise. Your brother James lost his clothes in the skirmish. But don't worry! I shall understand nothing but English, and behave every inch the spoiled British lordling. A perfect nuisance I shall be to you.'

‘Never that.'

He was wakened that night by a scratching below the trapdoor of the secret tunnel and remembered that Jenny had had it fastened from above. He opened it quickly and Lech appeared, breathless. ‘Are you ready to go?'

‘Now?'

‘The Cossacks are on the move again. This way. Leave now
and you have a chance of keeping ahead of them. The carriage is ready outside the school. Provisions. Everything you need. Here are your papers, lord, they came today. Fetch the women. You must be well on your way before the moon sets.'

Jenny argued for a moment, reluctant to leave without saying goodbye to Madame Poiret and her other friends at the palace, then: ‘You're right of course. If Lech says so. Tell him we'll be there in ten minutes.'

And, to Lech's amazement, they were; two very convincing young men.

The tunnel was even damper and more unpleasant going away from the palace than Glynde remembered it the other way. How strange to think, now, with Jenny's arm light in his, of those passionate nights, when he could not get fast enough to the Princess's bed. And Jan must have done the same. Disgusting. Not to be thought of. But Lech, in front with Marylka, had paused for a moment, now began to move carefully up a flight of slimy steps.

They emerged in the ruins of the school house, and Glynde felt Jenny's arm tense within his, as she remembered, like him, all those cheerful constructive days of looking after the boys. And he had seen them die, and done nothing. Her hand found his in the dark and pressed it. She knew what he was thinking, and it helped.

The carriage stood ready in the drive where the boys had died, four of the Princess's best horses harnessed to it. He decided not to notice. They were committed now. They must go. Lech was kissing Marylka, commending her to their care. Glynde took his hand; shook it firmly. ‘We'll take good care of her, Lech, be sure of that.'

‘I am.' Lech helped the ‘boys' into the carriage. Then, ‘Go with God, lord.'

‘The coachman?'

‘Is a Brother with messages for the Russians. You have nothing to fear from him.'

‘I'll never understand the Brotherhood,' said Jenny, as the man whipped up his horses.

‘Best not try, I think.' But Glynde thought Talleyrand's hand must be stretched out all across Europe to protect them, and just hoped it was powerful enough. Now they were commit
ted to it, he wondered if they were not entirely mad to embark on this venture across a country in the first throes of war. ‘But what else could we do?' He spoke as if he had been sharing his thoughts with Jenny.

‘Nothing. Whatever happens to any of us, I am sure we were right to do this. Never forget that. I know anything would be better than to spend the rest of my days starving in a Polish convent like poor Marta.'

He looked at her and actually laughed. ‘You don't look much like a nun at the moment.' It was extraordinary how the ruthless cropping of her hair had changed her from neat young woman to brown-skinned boy, and he remembered with a little shock of surprise how he used to compare her tanned weather-beaten skin unfavourably with the Princess's white elegance. Her boy's shirt was fastened high at the neck and he wondered where the rubies were now, remembering that glimpse of white shoulder. He must not let himself think like this.

‘I think you should have half the rubies.' Once again, disconcertingly, she seemed to have taken a thought out of his mind. ‘Have you somewhere safe to put them? I've given Marylka some too, just in case we get separated.'

Nothing stirred on the country tracks their driver chose. From time to time they crossed a swathe of desolation cut by the Cossacks on their way north, but had seen no sign of them when, having kept safely south of Lublin and north of Chelm, they crossed the swampy River Bug on a makeshift raft at first light one misty September morning. Their driver had picked up a homeless boy somewhere along the way, and now sent him off for information while he rested his horses beside a sluggish tributary of the Bug.

‘Russian territory at last,' Glynde told the two women as they returned from washing their faces in the slow-flowing stream.

‘So long as it's not held by the French,' said Jenny. ‘To be taken by them, with our papers, really would be out of the frying-pan into the fire.'

But the boy came back with comparatively good news. There had indeed been a battle somewhere to the north, but it was the Russian army that was retreating in their direction,
and he had heard news too of another army coming up from the south. ‘They look to meet somewhere around here.'

‘Then let us await them here,' said Glynde, and the driver was glad to let his exhausted horses rest awhile.

‘There's a safe house in the forest between here and Lusk,' he told them. ‘Not comfortable, but it will do.'

Resting, for the first time, somewhat at ease that night around the fire they had lit, Glynde asked the driver what other news the boy had brought. ‘I thought we would have found a great uprising of Polish peasants here against their Russian lords, now the French are come to support them.'

The man spat into the fire. ‘So you would have, lord, if the French had sent Poniatowski and his Polish legion to fight the Russians here in Volhynia. But who's going to rise in support of the bloody Austrians? It's better the devil you know, and that's the Russians.'

‘Lucky for us,' Glynde turned to Jenny. ‘But sad for Poland, I'm afraid.'

‘I begin to think everything is sad for Poland.'

There was no mass uprising, though Glynde suspected that the makeshift raft that had served them so well was also being used the other way by young patriots off to join the Polish army. ‘But only the upper classes,' he told Jenny. ‘No mass revolt of serfs.'

‘And no wonder,' she said. ‘All very well for the Duchy to give them their “freedom”. You know what happens if they demand it. They're free to go – and lose their land to their landlord. Freedom to starve.'

‘Still better than serfdom?'

‘How hard it is to tell. For us, who have taken freedom for granted, for ourselves and our servants, for so long.' She turned to him eagerly, firelight glinting in her curls. ‘Glynde, if I do get back to England, I want to do so much! It's hard to know where to begin. A school perhaps, to teach our young how lucky they are. Boys and girls! Don't think of skimping, Glynde, the journey comes first, but if I have enough rubies left, that's what I'll do.'

No. Marry me. But he did not say it. Paul Genet's mistress. But did he care? Was he mad! ‘I'll be as frugal as I safely can,'
he promised, vowing to himself that he would repay her, stone by stone, the moment he came into his inheritance.

‘Glynde Rendel!' Admiral Chichagov embraced his Petersburg friend warmly. ‘Robert Wilson sent you, of course? He promised me an English adviser and I'm delighted it's you. And your young brother? I didn't know you had one.' He enveloped Jenny too in a warm embrace, and then drew away, looking at them both quizzically.

‘Not my brother,' said Glynde. ‘And Robert Wilson did not send me.' He plunged into the story of their adventures and Chichagov contrived to listen intently while giving a flood of orders as the Russian army of the south pitched camp around them.

‘A splendid body of men,' he told Glynde. ‘They're glad to be on the way home to defend Mother Russia. And I'm glad to have you, however you got here. Robert Wilson promised to send me an English observer when he left me at Bucharest. He should be at Petersburg by now, fast as he travels. You'll stay, of course, and represent your government until his man arrives.'

‘There was no way out of it. No changing Chichagov, once he's set on something,' Glynde told Jenny later. ‘And in fact it's just as well we're to stay with the army. The news is unbelievable! We're lucky to have got here. The Russians have given way all along the front up north. Napoleon is clear across Lithuania and has won a battle at Smolensk. Both sides claim victory, Chichagov says, but it is the Russians who have retreated. He says he is afraid for Moscow itself, the holy city.'

‘Dear God! Is there to be no end to it?'

‘The Russians have a new Commander-in-Chief, Kutusov. He has ordered Chichagov to march north as fast as possible and cut Napoleon's line of communications. We start tomorrow. Chichagov suggests that you and Marylka maintain what he calls your very fetching disguise for the time being.'

‘I should just about think we will,' said Jenny. ‘But I don't know what we are to do about this habit Russian men have of embracing each other.'

‘You'll have to be a shy young Englishman and hold off,' suggested Glynde. ‘And I'm going to come the careful brother
and forbid your riding out on reconnaissance with me. Protest how you will, nothing is going to shift me.'

‘Thanks,' said Jenny.

The amalgamation with Tormassov's army complete, Chichagov marched his united force swiftly northwards. No need to worry unduly about Schwarzenberg's Austrian army, he told Glynde. A secret agreement between Austria and Russia had guaranteed that the Austrian forces would make only a token show of resistance.

‘They'll show their teeth at us, but do nothing,' Glynde explained to Jenny.

‘Napoleon's own father-in-law? I think it's disgusting.'

‘It's politics. And we should be grateful. There's news of another battle, at Borodino. Kutusov claims a victory, but he's retreating again.'

They were well north of the Pripet Marshes when young Lord Tyrconnel arrived with despatches from Sir Robert Wilson at Petersburg. Napoleon was in Moscow, but the Russians had burned it around him. ‘He's beaten, and doesn't understand it,' Tyrconnel told Glynde. ‘He's actually complained to the Tsar about Russia's barbarous mode of making war. Well, it is horrible! But you can't blame them. And it's going to be worse when winter comes.' Younger than Glynde, he had been delighted to find him at Chichagov's headquarters and was insistent that he stay. ‘Aside from anything else, you should not think of risking that young brother of yours in the desolation Russia has become. It's a holy war. They torture and kill their prisoners, burn and destroy everything as they retreat. You won't truly understand the devastation until you leave Polish Russia for the motherland. If Napoleon does retreat, as he must, his army is going to starve.'

Chichagov took Minsk a few days later, surprising the French garrison and capturing a great mass of French supplies. He had heard now that Napoleon was indeed retreating from Moscow, forced back along the blood-soaked way he had come, and his orders were to march east and join the trap that was to close on the Grand Army as the crossing of the Beresina.

‘I think you and Marylka should await the result here,' Glynde told Jenny in the comparative comfort of their inn room at Minsk. ‘I promise I'll come back for you.'

'You can promise to try,' said Jenny. ‘And I believe you. But I know Chichagov by now. He won't let you, and I don't blame him. So, we are coming with you, Marylka and I. She is out buying furs for us all. We'll be even less recognisable, she and I, now it's freezing and everyone is bundled up in so many clothes. Anyway, it's hardly the weather for rape.'

She had shocked him, but he knew in his heart that she was right. In the confusion of either victory or defeat, Chichagov would have neither time nor men to spare for two women left behind. They were safer with the army. Besides, the weather was getting worse and worse, all landmarks obliterated by snow. To travel alone across this war-torn, winter landscape would be suicide.

They reached the Beresina in a flurry of November snow and Chichagov launched his army straight across the long bridge that led to the little town of Borisov on its eastern bank. Glynde thought it a mad venture, until it succeeded. Dombrowski and his Poles, who were holding the town for Napoleon, had been concentrating on the east, from which the defeated Grand Army and its pursuers would come; this sudden attack from the west took them by complete surprise, and the Russians found themselves masters of the town and its vital bridge.

‘The whole Grand Army is in a trap now. The wrong side of the Beresina. They'll be desperate for this bridge.' Glynde was putting on his furs to go and dine with Chichagov. ‘I hope to God I can persuade the Admiral of the danger we are in, here on the eastern side of the river. Madness to bring his headquarters and all his supplies here.'

Jenny smiled. ‘You said it was madness to cross the bridge and attack the town at all, remember.'

‘True! But for God's sake don't think of leaving the house. And keep an eye on the landlord. I don't think he likes us much.'

‘Why should he? We're still in what was once Poland, Marylka tells me. And it was Poles who were holding the place.'

Marylka joined her after Glynde had gone. ‘Pani Jenny, I've been talking to the landlord. Told him I'm Polish. And he told me – You won't tell anyone?'