She had a vivid recollection of the moment when he had had his first stroke and was being brought back in from the garden at Bald Hills, supported under the arms, and with his grey eyebrows twitching away he had given her a shy, uneasy glance and muttered something. ‘Even then he was trying to tell me what he did tell me the day he died,’ she thought. ‘What he told me then, he had always thought.’
And then she remembered every detail of the night at Bald Hills before his stroke, when she had had a premonition of disaster, and had insisted on staying put. She hadn’t slept, and during the night she had stolen downstairs on tiptoe, gone to the door of the conservatory where her father was spending that night and listened to his voice. He was saying something to Tikhon in a weary, worried voice. He clearly wanted to talk. ‘Why didn’t he send for me? Why didn’t he let me be there instead of Tikhon?’ The thought had occurred to Princess Marya then, and it did so again now. ‘Now he’ll never be able to tell anyone the full story, all that was in his heart. Neither of us can ever return to that moment when he could have told me all that was on his mind, and with me listening instead of Tikhon it might have been heard and understood. Why didn’t I go in?’ she wondered. ‘He might have said it to me then – the things he said the day he died. Even then he asked about me twice while he was talking to Tikhon. He was longing to see me, and I just stood there, outside the door. He felt sad and weary talking to Tikhon – Tikhon could not understand him. I remember him talking about Lise as if she was still alive – he’d forgotten she was dead – and Tikhon reminded him she had passed away, and he shouted out, “You fool!” He was so miserable. Through the door I could hear him groaning as he lay back on the bed and shouted out, “Oh God!” Why didn’t I go in then? What could he have done to me? What could I have lost? Maybe he would have calmed down. Maybe he would have said it then.’ And Princess Marya repeated the affectionate word he had said to her the day he died. ‘Dar-ling!’ As she said it Princess Marya broke down in sobs and tears that were balm to her soul. She could see his face now. Not the face she had known for as long as she could remember and had always seen from a distance, but the other one, the feeble, timid face she had seen on the last day when she had bent down near to his lips to catch what he was saying and had, for the first time, examined it close to, with all its wrinkles and little features.
‘Darling,’ she repeated.
‘What was he thinking when he said that word? What is he thinking now?’ The question just came to her, and in response to it she caught a quick image of him with the same expression she had seen on his face in the coffin, tied round with a white cloth. And the same horror that had overcome her the moment she had touched him, and felt that this wasn’t him, that it was something mysterious and repulsive, came over her now. She tried to think about something else, tried to pray, but she could not do anything. She stared wide-eyed across at the moonlight and into the shadows, half-expecting at any moment to see his dead face, and she could feel herself falling under the spell of the stillness that reigned in and around that house.
‘Dunyasha!’ she whispered. ‘Dunyasha!’ she screamed like a wild thing, and tearing herself out of the stillness, she ran towards the maids’ room straight into the arms of the old nurse and the maids who had come rushing out to meet her.
CHAPTER 13
On the 17th of August Rostov and Ilyin, accompanied by Lavrushka, just back from imprisonment by the French, and a hussar orderly left Yankovo, ten miles or so from Bogucharovo, and went out for a ride to put Ilyin’s newly acquired horse through its paces and find out whether there was any hay to be had in the local villages.
For the last three days Bogucharovo had found itself in between the two hostile armies, and it was equally likely that the Russian rearguard or the French vanguard might arrive in the village, so Rostov, scrupulous squadron commander that he was, wanted to steal a march on the French in acquiring any provisions that might still be there.
Rostov and Ilyin were in the best of moods. On the way to Bogucharovo, which they knew only as an estate belonging to some prince, with a manor house where they hoped to find a lot of staff including, perhaps, one or two pretty servant-girls, they asked Lavrushka all about Napoleon and laughed at what he told them, or else they raced each other to put Ilyin’s new horse under pressure. Rostov was completely unaware that the village they were riding towards belonged to the very Prince Bolkonsky who had been engaged to his sister.
Rostov and Ilyin raced their horses flat out one last time along the uplands outside Bogucharovo and Rostov was the winner, the first to gallop down the village street.
‘You win,’ said Ilyin, all red in the face.
