The Golden Sabre. Jon Cleary

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СКАЧАТЬ General? Your men have already been here—’

      ‘I am coming in,’ said the General and pushed past her and kicked the door shut behind him. He looked up and saw Frederick and Olga leaning over the balustrade at the top of the stairs. He hated kids, especially the kids of these nambypamby Russian aristocrats. He bellowed ‘Back to your room! I don’t want to see you again! Go!’

      At the top of the stairs Frederick drew himself up; but Eden got in first: ‘Freddie, Olga – do as the General tells you! Go on, go back to your rooms – at once!’ Then she added, her voice thinning with the fear that was taking her over completely: ‘Please.’

      Frederick hesitated, then abruptly he grabbed his sister and the two of them disappeared from the top of the stairs. General Bronevich winked approvingly. ‘You know how to handle children – good, good. Sometimes I think they should all be strangled at birth. But then we shouldn’t be here enjoying each other, eh?’ The gold came out again, carats of good humour. ‘Well, let’s see where we’ll have our little interrogation. Are there any bedrooms downstairs?’

      ‘No, General.’Should I scream for help? ‘Let us go into the drawing-room.’

      The General, disappointed that he might have to take second best in the way of a comfortable rape, followed Eden into the drawing-room and shut the double-doors behind him.

      It was a long, high-ceilinged room with a parquet floor on which rugs were scattered. A big blue-patterned ceramic stove stood in one corner; there was also a marble-surrounded fireplace in which logs were already stacked as if winter might strike at any moment. The furniture, painted white with gold trim, was solid rather than elegant; but the white grand piano in one corner stood on graceful carved legs and apologized for the heaviness of some of the other furniture. When the Gorshkovs had fled St Petersburg they had brought no furniture, but they had come heavily laden with ornaments. The rugs on the floor were Bokhara’s best, brought from the house in St Petersburg; a Corot and a Watteau, bought by Princess Gorshkov on one of her visits to Paris, hung on the walls; several minor pieces by Fabergé decorated the mantelpiece. But Bronevich, a man with a crude eye, saw none of these better adornments.

      He walked to the piano, opened up the keyboard lid and struck the keys with hammer fingers. He nodded admiringly at the discord he had created, then looked around him. He saw the long couch facing the open french windows and the view of the wheatfields beyond. It was not as good as a bed, but it would do. He put his belt and holstered pistol on a side table and took off his jacket.

      Eden, not quite believing this was happening, said, ‘General, what are you going to do?’

      ‘You,’ said the General and exposed his member, which, slant-eyed and bald-headed, looked as Mongolian as the rest of him.

      Out in the barn Cabell, having seen Pemenov in the car and the six soldiers on their horses go off down the avenue, was wondering what was happening in the house. Down below him Nikolai had come back into the barn and was wandering up and down in a frenzy of fear and worry.

      Cabell called down to him. ‘Go across and see what’s happening.’

      Nikolai’s upturned face showed eyes as white as a terrified horse’s. ‘He will kill me—’

      Then there was a scream from the house. Cabell, clutching his rifle, tumbled down the ladder, went racing out of the barn and across towards the open french windows. He leapt up the steps and plunged into the drawing-room as General Bronevich tried to plunge into the wildly evasive Eden.

      Cabell shouted and the General, letting go his trousers, spun round and grabbed for his pistol on the table beside the couch. His trousers fell down round his ankles, he stumbled and fell forward on his knees and Cabell hit him hard behind the ear with the stock of the rifle. The General gave a grunt and went down on his face, twitched and lay still. Cabell kicked him over on his back, saw the General’s erection and modestly kicked him over on his face again.

      Eden sat up on the couch, gasping for breath as she pulled her skirt down over her exposed legs. Her hair had tumbled down from its pins and hung wildly about the torn shoulders of her shirt; she looked nothing like the starched governess Cabell had talked to out in the barn. She glanced down at General Bronevich and saw the huge lump behind his ear from which blood was welling in a dark bubble.

      ‘Oh my God! Is he–?’

      For the first time Cabell realized what he might have done. He dropped down on one knee and felt the General’s pulse. Then he rolled the Tartar over on his back, grabbed a rug and threw it over the now limp weapon that had threatened Eden, and bent his ear to the General’s broad fat chest. Then he straightened up, wondering if today wasn’t someone else’s nightmare that he had wandered into.

      ‘He’s dead!’

      Then the door burst open and Frederick, a double-barrelled shotgun held at the ready, stood there with a wide-eyed, terribly frightened Olga at his shoulder. The two children looked down at the dead General, then Olga pushed past her brother and ran into Eden’s arms. Eden tried to comfort her while trying to pull herself together. Too much had happened in the last five minutes, she had been raped emotionally if not physically.

      Cabell crossed to Frederick and took the gun from him. The boy stared at him, but there was no dispute. He would have fired the gun if there had been need for it; he was prepared to kill but he was not prepared for death. He had seen dead men before, the bodies of soldiers glimpsed lying beside the railway tracks as they had fled from St Petersburg, but he had never seen death up close. It was even more horrifying to have it here in the house with them.

      ‘We’ve got to get away,’ said Cabell. ‘When will that dwarf in the car be back? Eden, I’m talking to you!’

      Eden’s senses, which seemed to have left her, started to work again. ‘The dwarf? Oh – he told him to come back in an hour. But—’

      ‘No buts. We’re getting out of here. You, me and the kids.’

      Frederick drew a deep breath, took his eyes off the corpse on the floor and tried again to be the man he thought he was. ‘How? You said your motor car won’t work—’

      ‘We could go on horseback,’ said Eden. ‘But not to Ekaterinburg—’

      ‘There’s a British consul there – you’d be okay—’

      ‘But not the children—’ Her mind was in gear again. ‘The local commander in Ekaterinburg would not let the children go—’

      ‘Then we better head somewhere else. Does that Rolls-Royce work?’

      ‘Of course,’ said Frederick. ‘Every week I run the engine – Father asked me to do that. But we’d have to put the wheels on. Father took them off and put them in one of the big wine vats with french chalk on them, to stop the tyres from perishing,’ he said.

      ‘Okay, you come with me. Eden, you and Olga pack a bag. You better tell the servants to get the hell out of here – they don’t want to be in the house when the dwarf and those soldiers come back and find him.’ He nodded down at the dead General, just a mound beneath the Bokhara rug. ‘Can you see the road from upstairs?’

      ‘Yes, from the main bedroom.’

      ‘Olga, you stay at the window and keep an eye on the road. Let me know in a hurry if those soldiers start coming up from the gates. Eden, when you’ve packed your bag, get some СКАЧАТЬ