Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [362]
It was towards the end of the evening, when the others were outside, that Olga found herself dancing alone with Pinegin. As usual he was wearing his white uniform, but now it seemed to her rather becoming. She also noticed that he really danced very well – nothing flashy, his movements firm but controlled, and easy to follow. It was a pleasant sensation.
Then, suddenly, everyone was back. Sergei cried: ‘A mazurka!’ to the musicians. And scarcely waiting to ask Pinegin, he swept her away in a wild dance, whirling her round the room, stamping his feet, while Pinegin stood by the side of the room, silently. ‘I was lucky,’ Sergei explained to her. ‘I got lessons from the great dancing master Didelot himself.’
But Olga found, rather to her surprise, that she would have preferred it if he had not interrupted her dance with Pinegin.
The opening thunderclap of the great storm that was about to engulf them took everyone, including Olga, completely by surprise. It came the very next morning, when Sergei was in the bath house.
No one in Russia, from the imperial family to the most miserable serf, could imagine life without the traditional Russian bath. Similar in kind to a Scandinavian sauna, the bath house contained a stove which heated a deep shelf of large stones, upon which the bather tipped water to fill the room with steam. To stimulate the blood he might also swat himself with birch twigs. In a city, the communal bath house would take scores of people at a time; the little bath house on the Bobrov estate took only three or four.
Sergei loved to take a bath: in summer he would run down afterwards and throw himself into the river; in winter he would roll in the snow. And it was just as, tousle-haired and gasping, he emerged from the water that morning that little Misha came running down the slope towards him, crying out: ‘Uncle Sergei! You’ll never guess what’s happened. They’ve come to arrest the priest at Russka.’
It was true. Two hours earlier the big, red-headed priest had been astonished by the arrival of three blue-coated gendarmes of the Third Department who methodically proceeded to ransack his house. Within an hour the town, the monastery, and even the village of Bobrovo were buzzing with the news. What could it mean?
Olga guessed at once. She guessed – and her heart sank.
‘Oh, Seriozha,’ she whispered. ‘What have you done?’
‘Nothing much,’ he confessed with a sly grin. He had sent an anonymous letter to the Department saying the priest was operating an illegal Masonic press and distributing pamphlets. And to her protest that this accusation was unlikely, he replied: ‘It’s unbelievable. But the gendarmes don’t seem to think so, do they?’
‘Oh, Seriozha.’ She didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. It was well known that Benckendorff’s department was being snowed under with false accusations from all quarters, and that some of their investigations had been strange, to say the least. ‘God help you when Alexis finds out,’ she said.
It was noon, just as the gendarmes, having found nothing, were leaving when Alexis, returning from a morning ride, passed through Russka and the shaken priest told him his story. Like Olga, Alexis guessed the cause at once.
And so it was that, seeing Sergei that afternoon, sitting with the family, he gave him a look of chilling scorn, and without the need of any further explanation said quietly: ‘You will regret this very much, I promise you.’
Alexis was surprised, early that evening, when Sergei’s manservant requested a discreet interview with him.
To the Bobrov serfs, Sergei’s position had always been a little puzzling. When his father died, they saw that the estates went to his brothers; but though Sergei’s different looks had caused some ribald speculation, it was more generally assumed that his youth and wild ways were the reason