The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ French Riviera.’

      ‘You have a little while to go before that happens, my girl.’

      Ah, what dreams we women have! But at ten she, living in the semi-detached house in Croydon, south of London, had been dreaming of nothing more than being the bride of the boy next door who, she remembered now, had had adenoids and a tendency to nervously pick his nose when spoken to by a girl. She had never thought of herself as of the stuff of which French Riviera beauties were made. But then she had also never thought that she would finish up here in Russia and Siberia as governess to the children of a Russian aristocrat.

      It was another hour before they came to the first fields that marked the border of the Gorshkov estate. Once a month Eden drove into Verkburg in the carriage to see if any mail had arrived for herself or the children; it was a twelve-mile drive each way and she did not enjoy it in the summer heat. There had been no letter today for her from her parents, but there had been one each for the children from their mother and another one for her. The children had read theirs with excitement and delight; she had read hers with growing trepidation and despair. She turned the horses in through the white pillars of the gateway and drove up the long avenue of poplars and wondered how much longer she and the children were going to be isolated here, the children separated from their parents and she from the England that she had now begun to pine for.

      She pulled the horses to a halt in front of the Gorshkov house. The house, built of a white-painted stone with a Palladian façade that had been added by the children’s grandfather, looked out of place amongst the wooden barns that surrounded it. Grandfather Gorshkov, the first Prince Gorshkov to add wealth to his title, had tried to buy taste at a time, in Europe, when taste was not at its highest. The Palladian-fronted house in itself was attractive; he had just not known enough to complement it with the appropriate surroundings. Plane trees threw shadows that softened the grey drabness of the barns and cow-sheds, and a few lilacs, faded now by the summer sun, added a touch of colour in the yard between the main barn and the house.

      The Gorshkov estate covered fifteen thousand acres. It had been founded originally by a Prince Gorshkov who had been one of Catherine the Great’s lovers; he had lasted three months and had been known as the Wednesday Man, that being his day to perform. Arriving one Wednesday and finding he was in a queue, he had decided his time was up and left St Petersburg, exiling himself before Catherine disposed of him more permanently. He had come east, established himself and died here on the estate, leaving a wife, a son and two daughters. Following generations had built up the estate and in 1860, in the reign of Alexander II, they had moved back to St Petersburg and built themselves a small mansion just off the Nevsky Prospekt. The young princes had been educated in the Cadet Corps; the princesses went to the Smolny Institute. Though their names were never entered in the livre de Velours, they were close enough to flutter like loose addenda to that almanac of nobility. Princess Gorshkov, the children’s mother, whose family had been in the Livre de Velours, had impressed all this on Eden when she had first arrived in St Petersburg. Eden, who had not even met the Mayor of Croydon, had been suitably impressed at the time, though her awe had since worn off.

      Far out on the rear boundary of the estate Eden knew the farm workers would be bringing in the harvest; tomorrow the traction engine in the threshing yard would be started up and today’s somnolent peace would be gone. This would be the first harvest since Prince Gorshkov had gone off to fight with General Denikin’s army. She wondered if the workers would demand it as their own property. No one knew these days what the workers were going to demand next.

      As she got down from the carriage Nikolai Yurganov came across from the stables and took the horses’ heads. ‘Miss Eden—’

      She turned back as she was about to follow the children into the house. ‘What is it, Nikolai?’

      ‘There’s a man in the big bam – I think you should see him—’

      ‘A man? What sort of man?’

      ‘A foreigner, Miss Eden. He has a motor car—’ Nikolai Petrovitch Yurganov was a young man convinced already that he would not last to be old. He was a Cossack from the Don who had come east to avoid the fighting and carousing that had been his family’s main pursuits. He had pale brown hair, already starting to thin, a long bony face, a body to match it and a soft girlish voice. He had a pathological fear of horses and one small glass of vodka stunned him like a blow with a rifle-butt. At his birth he had set the Cossack tradition back a millennium. ‘He drove in here a while ago. His tyres are punctured—’

      Eden stood irresolute. In the nine months since Prince and Princess Gorshkov had gone off to Georgia she had had no major problems to face; the war was a long way from here and even General Bronevich’s soldiers had not come out of town to worry her and the children. Once she had been myopic to consequences, the essential talent for any sense of adventure; she would, if she lasted long enough, stand gasping with admiration for the sunrise on Judgement Day. But today’s letter from Princess Gorshkov had brought a sense of foreboding.

      ‘Can’t you get rid of him?’

      Nikolai shook his head. ‘He won’t take any notice of me, Miss Eden – no one ever does—’

      ‘Oh damn!’ she said under her breath and, carrying her parasol, stalked across to the main barn and into its cool dim interior. She saw the strange truck at the rear of the barn, next to Prince Gorshkov’s car under its big canvas cover; then she saw the man in a blue shirt, bib-and-tucker overalls and a flat-crowned cowboy’s hat sitting on the running-board of the truck. ‘What are – Oh, it’s you!’

      ‘Well, well, if it isn’t the old handbag whirler—’ Cabell felt his bruised ear. ‘I’d like you beside me some time in a bar-room brawl.’

      ‘Just the sort of place where I spend most of my time.’ Why am I sounding so tart? She should be welcoming this man, whoever he was; he was the first non-Russian she had spoken to in over two years, ever since the Gorshkovs had fled St Petersburg for this estate. ‘I’m sorry, Mr–?’

      ‘Cabell.’

      ‘What are you doing here?’

      Somehow he had suggested to her that he would be garrulous, as long-winded as Trotsky, whom she had once heard speak; instead, in what seemed to her no more than half a dozen sentences, he told her who he was and how he had arrived here in the Gorshkov barn. But even his brevity landed like a weight on her.

      ‘You can’t stay here! I have the children to think of—’

      ‘Miss Eden.’ Nikolai stood like a trembling shadow in the doorway of the barn. ‘There are horsemen coming up the avenue!’

      ‘Oh Jesus,’ said Cabell. ‘I better be going—’

      ‘Going where?’

      ‘I’ll try and make it out there to the wheat-fields. Maybe I can hide—’

      ‘Stay where you are.’ Even as her decision was forming in her mind she wondered why she was making it. Was it just because the man spoke English? Did her charity lie only in her ear? She could not imagine herself being so impulsive about helping a Russian. ‘Put the horses away, Nikolai. And keep your mouth shut – you know nothing, you understand?’

      She went out again into the glare, opening her blue parasol and raising it against the golden brightness. As the half-dozen horsemen galloped into the broad area in front of the house, Frederick and Olga came running out of the front door. ‘What’s going on? Why the soldiers? Are we being attacked?’

      ‘Be СКАЧАТЬ