The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ she was on the shelf for good: twenty-six and no husband in sight. But she couldn’t see herself taking a centenarian bridegroom home to Croydon.

      ‘There is not much time. You may be dead by tomorrow afternoon. This man Keria is very impulsive.’

      She had heard the phrase a shotgun wedding, something that Americans evidently went in for. But this was terrifyingly ludicrous: a firing-squad wedding. ‘I shall have to talk to Mr Cabell.’

      ‘Is he your lover?’

      She hesitated, then nodded: any port in a storm. ‘He won’t like it.’

      ‘He will if you save his life and the children’s. What does he do besides tell lies about being a comrade?’

      ‘He’s an engineer, an oil engineer. A geologist.’

      ‘They’re practical men,’ said Delyanov, as if the engineers he had known put romance to some mathematical test. ‘Ah, here comes the little girl. That better, my dear? A little bladder relief does wonders.’

      Olga gave him her princess look. ‘One does not talk about such things in polite company.’

      Delyanov smiled in the depths of his beard. ‘You’ll be a great lady some day, my dear. May you live long enough,’ he said, and winked at Eden.

      He escorted them back to the railway station, exhorted Eden to consider his proposal as a serious one and left them in the care of the two young guards. Eden closed the waiting-room door on the youths, leaving them sitting on a bench in the sun. They didn’t protest but sat there dumbly, now and again looking at each other as if expecting some flash of intelligence that would tell them exactly what their duties were. They had heard all the theory from Comrade Keria, but this was the first lesson in the practice of revolution and they were at a loss. The revolution, Keria had told them, was a Russian affair, a war against the Tsar and all the reactionaries who had supported him. And here they were guarding two foreigners, a couple of kids and a scrawny one who sometimes walked like a girl.

      Eden sat down on a bench in the waiting room and said, ‘The old man wants me to marry him.’

      ‘He is far too old for you,’ said Frederick. ‘He would be impotent.’

      ‘Watch it!’

      ‘What sort of education did you give these kids?’ said Cabell; but it was only a mark-time remark while he took in what she had said. ‘The old son-of-a-bitch must be senile. It’s – it’s indecent!’

      ‘What is the matter?’ Nikolai said in Russian.

      Cabell told him and the Cossack rolled his head in shock and despair.

      Eden said, ‘If I marry him, he says he can arrange it that you four go free.’

      ‘No!’ said Cabell and the two children echoed him. ‘It’s all a bluff. That guy won’t have us shot.’

      But later that night, trying to sleep on one of the hard wooden benches, Cabell felt no optimism at all about their fate. He had heard of the wholesale killing by both sides in this bloody civil war and he knew and understood some of the hatred that fired the revolutionaries. Keria was one of them, recognizable at a glance, a man looking for a way out of a hole in the ground to a place on top of the mountain. Cabell had seen the coal miners on strike in the hills of Pennsylvania, the men who had inherited the fierce passions of the Molly Maguires of the 1870’s. Miners had the seeds of revolution ingrained in them as deeply as the mine dust in their lungs. He could not blame Keria for the way he felt. He just did not want to die as a way of proving Keria’s revolutionary zeal. And there was also the villagers’ hatred of outsiders … Tomorrow there would be no one on his and the others’ side at the trial, no one but a randy old man offering to marry a girl young enough to be his great-granddaughter.

      He turned over to go to sleep and saw Eden sitting up on her bench, her head and shoulders outlined against the moonlit window. Quietly he got up and went and sat beside her.

      They spoke in whispers, not wanting to wake the children and Nikolai. ‘What am I to do?’ she said. ‘I keep thinking of the children. And you,’ she added. Then added further, lives weighing on her like sacks of potatoes: ‘And Nikolai.’

      ‘It’s not worth the risk,’ he said. ‘The old man can’t guarantee we’d be let go.’

      ‘Perhaps I could save my own life. I’m ashamed that I keep thinking of that.’

      He felt for her hand, found it. It was the first time he had touched her and both felt the immediate intimacy; but their hands were stiff one within the other, arthritic with caution, wary of the circumstances that had brought them this close. ‘When he dies – it could happen tomorrow, the day after, any time … What happens to you then?’

      ‘They’d probably kill me then.’ Her fingers were just dead bones in his hand.

      ‘I’m not going to let that happen. Not to any of us.’

      ‘What are you going to do?’ Then she started to weep. It was something she hadn’t done in a long time, not since the first lonely weeks when she had first come to Russia and then when they had buried Igor Dulenko. She had never thought of tears as a sign of feminine weakness, but somehow she had survived without them till now. When Cabell put his arms round her she didn’t resist but leant her head against his shoulder and let the tears come. It was so long since he had held a girl like this one in his arms that he felt awkward; there had been girls in his arms but they had been paid for and none of them had asked for gentleness or sympathy. He brushed his lips against her hair, but said nothing.

      On a bench opposite them Nikolai watched them and wept, too. For himself alive today as much as for himself dead tomorrow. He longed for love, but there was no man who would comfort him.

      [4]

      In the morning the villagers came early to the square, like a football crowd eager to get good seats for today’s big match. They brought chairs with them and set them up in a hollow square in front of the railway station. The sun climbed through a brilliant sky and the tree-shrouded mountains flickered with flashes of green as the trees stirred in the slight morning breeze; to the east clouds lay on the horizon like the white negative of another dark range. The breeze suddenly dropped as the sun got higher, the trees in the square drew their shadows into themselves and the heat already began to sear like an invisible flame. Two ravens appeared out of nowhere, materializing like black spirits, and flapped lazily on to the roof of the railway station. They croaked miserably as the prisoners were led out of the waiting room and Cabell, looking up, thought of the line (was it from Hamlet?): The croaking raven doth bellow for revenge.

      But there was no look of revenge on the faces of the crowd sitting on their chairs, standing in orderly groups. They looked uncertain this morning, as if during the night they had dreamed of the enormity of what they wanted, the death of the outsiders. The old men sat in the front row, some of them with their wives.

      Delyanov rose from his chair and came forward. He carried a bunch of red roses and, taking off his hat with a sweeping gesture, he handed the bouquet to Eden. ‘Everyone knows of my proposal. I announced it last night. You will be welcomed by all as my wife.’

      ‘Silly old bugger,’ said an old woman in the front row and chomped her gums at him.

      Delyanov turned to her. ‘You are only jealous, Natasha СКАЧАТЬ