Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [201]
Andrei did not need to cross the river. Instead, he crept stealthily up to a large wooden hut at the edge of the hamlet.
A watchdog cocked its head at his approach, but scenting him came forward, wagging its tail and whimpering softly until Andrei quieted it.
The building had an upper storey; in the end wall, a single window looked out under the eaves, with carved shutters and a little balcony in front of it. The shutters were open, to let in the night air.
Carefully, but easily, Andrei climbed up and sat astride the balcony, before tapping gently on the window frame.
‘Anna.’
Silence.
‘Anna, I’m coming in.’
This time there was a faint sound from within. A pale form appeared in the shadows of the room. There was a soft laugh.
‘So what do you want, my young brave, calling on a girl at night?’ The low voice laughed again. ‘Be off or I’ll set the dogs on you.’
Andrei chuckled.
‘They won’t do anything.’
‘I could call my father.’
‘You could. But you won’t.’ He started to swing his leg over the window frame, but she moved forward quickly, caught his ankle, and pushed it out again.
‘No you don’t.’
Now he could see her, and it made him catch his breath. Anna was the daughter of a Cossack like his father but her mother was from the faraway Caucasus – the villagers called her the Circassian – and the result of this union was a girl unlike any other in the region. She was almost as tall as he was, slim, with dark brown hair, a pale creamy skin, and a head held so high that she seemed to stare at the world as proudly as a young warrior. Indeed, her bold eyebrows, straight, strong nose and firm chin might almost have been those of a handsome youth; but a slight upturning at the end of the nose, and the wonderful, full lips, both proud yet always, it seemed, about to open into a warm kiss, undercut any masculinity in her other features and made her, for Andrei and many others, tantalizingly desirable.
She was sixteen and unmarried.
‘Nor will I be, until I see a man I like,’ she had announced to her parents and the village in half-mocking defiance.
In the manner of the Cossack girls, she lived a free and easy life with the young men of the village. Some of them might even steal a kiss – though if they tried to go too far they would find her more than a match for them and like as not be sent sprawling.
But since Andrei had returned from the seminary a few months before, there had been a subtle change in her manner towards him.
Little as the Poles might think of the Orthodox Church, in the last twenty years it had made great strides. Under an ambitious young churchman, a Moldavian noble by birth, called Peter Mogila, who had come first to the Monastery of the Caves and then become Metropolitan at Kiev, an academy and numerous schools had been set up. Though they imitated the Jesuit Schools of the Poles, they were strictly Orthodox – Ostap would never have sent Andrei otherwise. The new movement set up printing presses too, and already literacy was becoming widespread.
To Anna, therefore, young Andrei was the nearest thing she had come across to a gentleman. He could read and write. He spoke a little Latin and Polish. His father’s farm was a fair size. And he was undeniably handsome.
It was not long before people were whispering: ‘He’s the one’, or ‘A fine couple’, and she found that she had no objection.
For above all, she sensed that within Andrei’s charm and youthful exuberance lay the one quality she admired above all others – the one thing that truly attracted her.
‘He has ambition,’ she remarked to her father.
This had not meant much to the Cossack; but she had taken care