A few minutes later Prince Andrey rang his bell, and Natasha went in to see him while Sonya, in a rare state of excitement and emotion, stayed behind by the window, contemplating the weirdness of the way things had turned out.
That day there was an opportunity of sending letters to the army, and the countess was writing to her son.
‘Sonya,’ she said, looking up from her letter as her niece walked past. ‘Sonya, you will write to Nikolay, won’t you?’ She spoke in a gentle voice with a tremor in it. Sonya could read her meaning in the weary eyes that peered out over her spectacles. It was a look that contained a strong plea, a dread of refusal, shame at having to beg and a capacity for implacable hatred if there was a refusal.
Sonya went to the countess, knelt by her and kissed her hand.
‘Yes, Mamma, I will,’ she said.
Sonya was feeling chastened, excited and deeply moved by all that had happened that day, especially the mysterious way in which her prophetic vision had come true. Now, knowing that the rapprochement between Natasha and Prince Andrey meant that Nikolay wouldn’t be able to marry Princess Marya, she welcomed a resurgence of the self-sacrificing spirit she was used to, and liked to live by. She sat down with a gratifying sense of doing something truly magnanimous, and although her velvet-black eyes were blinded with tears so that she had to keep breaking off, she managed to write the poignant letter that was to have such a strong impact on Nikolay when he received it.
CHAPTER 9
In the guardroom where Pierre had been taken the officer and soldiers who had arrested him treated him with hostility but not without a certain respect. Their attitude was one of doubt about his identity – could he possibly be someone of importance? – mixed with hostility inspired by their recent struggle with him.
But when the guard changed next morning Pierre could sense that the new detail – officers and men – did not find him as interesting as he had been to the soldiers who had brought him in. And, indeed, the next day’s guard, looking at this big, stout man in a peasant’s coat, saw nothing of the beefy character who had fought so desperately with the pillaging soldier and the convoy, and had uttered those solemn words about saving a child; he was nothing more than prisoner No. 17 in a group of Russians who were being detained for some reason at the pleasure of the higher authorities. If there was anything odd about Pierre it was his gritty air of deep concentration, together with his excellent French, which greatly surprised his captors. Nevertheless, during the day Pierre was put in with all the other suspicious characters who had been arrested, because his room was wanted for an officer.
All the Russians detained with Pierre were the dregs of society. And without exception, once they knew he was a gentleman and a French-speaker to boot, they kept away from him. Pierre listened gloomily as they joked about him.
The following evening Pierre learnt that all the prisoners (probably including him) were to be tried for arson. On the third day Pierre was taken into a house along with the others to be confronted by a French general with white moustaches sitting there with two colonels, and some other Frenchmen with scarves on their sleeves. They put a series of questions to Pierre and the others with the correctness and scrupulous care that is used with all defendants and is supposed to eliminate human fallibility: they wanted to know who he was, where he had been, what he had been doing there, and so on.
