Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [328]
‘But how? Who gave us money?’
‘No one, Alyosha. The estates are quite profitable, you know. And,’ she smiled wryly, ‘our expenses in the country are modest, you see.’
He had said nothing, but after she had gone he sighed to himself and murmured: ‘The truth is, the best thing I ever did for the Bobrov family was to go to jail.’ It was an uncomfortable thought, and was soon followed by another: What use, then, will I be to my family even when I am released? The German girl had taken over.
Though he loved and admired his wife, he came often to ponder this, grimly, by day.
The dream that came to him by night was so absurd that it was laughable. It did not come very often; sometimes weeks, even a couple of months, might pass in between occurrences. But whenever the dream reappeared, it was always exactly the same.
It was the countess. She came to him just as she had that night years ago – a pale, insistent vision, staring at him, wagging her finger and hissing with an urgency that was as terrible as it was meaningless: ‘Voltaire. Voltaire.’
Why should this foolish dream upset him so? It was hard to say. Yet each time he had it, he awoke with a sense of emptiness and desolation that was hard to bear; he would awake with a cry that echoed round the monastery, and in the dim light from the dawn, he would find, even in the staring, angry eyes of the False Peter, a certain sense of comfort.
Once, after he had been in the cell for three years, the vision appeared as usual, but instead of speaking, the old countess just stared at him, with a quiet satisfaction; and then, obscenely, as if they were sharing some obscure joke about the world from beyond the grave, it seemed to Alexander that she winked. After that, the dream did not recur again.
It was a little before Christmas, in the year 1795, that Alexander heard a sled arrive in the courtyard of the monastery; its arrival was followed by a long pause then, to his surprise, he was taken out of his cell and brought to the one used for visits, and a few minutes later, a figure in a fur coat and hat was ushered in.
It was Adelaide de Ronville.
She had been visiting Vladimir. ‘And you know,’ she explained with a little shrug, ‘it’s not so far to Russka, in a sled.’
Alexander smiled. How moved he was that she should have made the journey. ‘How did you get in here? Did you bribe the monks?’ She nodded. ‘And where will you stay? You must go to our estate. You can’t get back to Vladimir tonight.’
‘Yes. They are expecting me there.’
He did not argue. ‘Let me look at you,’ he begged, and helped her off with her coat.
She stood before him. She was sixty. The lines on her face were more deeply scored, making an intricate network; yet when she turned her face up to his, it seemed to Alexander that, more than ever, the lines only accentuated and further defined what had been there. She made a slightly ironic little gesture with her mouth. ‘I grow old. These days, you know, there is nothing so wonderful to see.’
‘I do not agree.’
They talked for a little time. He asked after the countess, and learned that she was very frail, but otherwise unchanged. Had she forgiven him? ‘Of course not.’ He asked Adelaide about her own life. Had she a new lover?
‘Perhaps. Perhaps not. It’s not important.’ They talked quietly, just as usual, until a monk came to indicate that Adelaide must leave. As Alexander held her coat for her again, he lightly touched her arm.
For many hours after Adelaide had gone, he found to his own surprise that he was trembling; and by this understood, more certainly even than in years gone by, that he would always be the prisoner of this, the nearest that he had come to passion in his life.
On the last day of the year 1796, some seven weeks