By the time he reached home it was getting dark. That evening more than half-a-dozen assorted visitors came to see him – a committee secretary, the colonel of his militia battalion, his steward, his butler, and several other petitioners. All of them had business to discuss with Pierre, and he had decisions to make. He hadn’t the slightest idea what they were on about, not the slightest interest in any of them, and to each man in turn he blurted out the first thing that came into his head just to get rid of him. Alone at last, he broke open his wife’s letter and read it through.
‘
When he woke up the following morning his butler came in with the news that an official from the police department had been expressly ordered by Count Rostopchin to come round and find out whether Count Bezuhov had already left, or was on his way.
A dozen assorted visitors were waiting downstairs in the drawing-room to see Pierre on business. Pierre threw on some clothes, but instead of going down to see the waiting throng, he ran down the back stairs and slipped out through the gate.
From that moment on, until after the destruction of Moscow, despite many attempts to trace him, no member of Bezukhov’s household staff saw him again, or knew where he had gone.
CHAPTER 12
The Rostovs stayed on in Moscow until the 1st of September, the day before the enemy entered the city.
Once Petya had joined Obolensky’s Cossack regiment and gone off to Belaya Tserkov, where the regiment was forming, the countess panicked. For the first time that summer the realization that both of her sons were away at war, both had flown the nest, and today or tomorrow either one of them might get killed, possibly both of them at the same time, which had happened to the three sons of a lady she knew, struck her with painful clarity. She tried to get Nikolay back, she wanted to run off after Petya and get him posted to Petersburg, but neither was possible. Petya couldn’t be brought back unless his regiment came back too, or unless he was transferred to another regiment on active service. Nikolay was away at the front somewhere, and not a word had been heard from him since his last letter, which had contained a detailed description of his encounter with Princess Marya. The countess couldn’t sleep at night, and when she did sleep she dreamt that both of her sons had been killed. After much deliberation and consultation the count eventually hit on a way of soothing the countess. He got Petya transferred from Obolensky’s regiment to Bezukhov’s, which was in training near Moscow. True, Petya was still in the army, but this transfer gave the countess the consolation of seeing at least one of her sons under her wing again, and she was hoping to arrange for Petya never to go away, and always to be sent to serve in places where there would be no risk of his going into battle. While ever Nikolay had been the only one in danger the countess had imagined, not without some qualms of conscience, that she loved her eldest child more than the others, but now that her younger boy, naughty little Petya, bad at his lessons, the clumsy boy who broke everything in the house and drove them all wild, her Petya, with his turned-up nose, laughing black eyes and fresh rosy cheeks with only a bit of fluff on them, had got in with those huge, awful, violent men who had gone away somewhere fighting over something or other, and enjoying it too – now as a mother she seemed to love him more, much more, than all the rest. The nearer they got to the time when her longed-for Petya was due back in Moscow, the more worried the countess became. She felt certain she would never live to see such happiness. The close proximity of Sonya, or her favourite Natasha, or even her husband simply irritated the countess. ‘I don’t need them. All I want is Petya!’ she thought.
One day towards the end of August, the Rostovs received another letter from Nikolay. He was writing from the province of Voronezh, where he had been sent to procure fresh horses. This letter brought no comfort to the countess. The knowledge that one son was out of danger just made her more apprehensive about Petya.
