Russka - Edward Rutherfurd [388]
The two men had stripped to their shirts. There was a faint chill in the air which caused Sergei involuntarily to shiver.
Karpenko and Misha, both very pale, had loaded the pistols. Now they handed them to the two men.
And all the time, Misha kept thinking: I know this must be done. It is the only honourable way. And yet it’s insane. It is not real.
There was no sound, for some reason, not even a bird, as the two men paced slowly away from each other. All that could be heard was the faint sound of their feet brushing the short, damp grass.
They turned. Two shots rang out.
And both seconds ran, with a cry, to Sergei.
It was not surprising that the bullet had struck him precisely in the heart. Ever since he was a young man, Pinegin had never been known to miss. Down in the frontier forts, he had an enviable reputation for it: which was why, years ago, Alexis had remarked that Pinegin was a dangerous man.
When Alexis returned to Russka that afternoon and heard the news, he broke down and wept. At his request, Pinegin left at once.
But the most unexpected event took place that evening.
Sergei’s letter to Alexis was a very simple, but moving document. It asked his forgiveness, first, for any hurt he had brought the family. He told Alexis, frankly, how hard it had been for him to forgive the exile in the Urals that his brother had engineered; but thanked him for his restraint in the years since. And it ended with a single request.
For there is one great wrong I have
done in my life – you may not agree
because you follow the legal rules
applying to serfdom – but to me, when
I foolishly gave the game away and
caused Savva Suvorin to be caught
again, I did him a terrible wrong.
You have a clear conscience about it,
I know. But I have not, and there’s
nothing I can do about it.
I know from our mother that he has
offered you a huge sum for his
freedom. If you have any love for
me, Alexis, I beg you to take it and
let the poor fellow go free.
Twice Alexis read this. Twice he noticed that little phrase – ‘You have a clear conscience about it’ – and twice he shook his head sadly as he remembered the bank-notes he had hidden all those years ago.
And so it was that evening that, after struggling uselessly for decades, Savva Suvorin was astonished to be summoned to the manor house and told by Alexis, with a weary smile: ‘I have decided, Suvorin, to accept your offer. You are a free man.’
1855
Sevastopol. At times it seemed to Misha Bobrov that no one would ever get out of it.
We’re marooned, he used to think each day, like men on a desert island.
Yet of all those defending the place, of any man fighting in this whole, insane Crimean War, was there anyone, he wondered, in a stranger position than he? For while I struggle to survive in Sevastopol, he considered, I’m under almost certain sentence of death if I ever get out of it. The absurd irony of the situation almost amused him. At least, he thought, I can thank God I shall leave a son. His boy Nicolai had been born the previous year. That was one happy consolation at any rate.
His sense that he was on a desert island in Sevastopol was not so fanciful. The great fortified port lay in a circle of yellowish hills near the southern tip of the Crimean peninsula – not far from the ancient Tatar capital of Bakhchisarai – and was therefore some hundred and fifty miles out from the Russian mainland into the waters of the warm Black Sea. To the south, before the port’s massive, jutting fortifications, the forces of three major European powers – French, British and Turkish – were encamped. The bombardment from their artillery – superior in every way to anything the Russians possessed – had been pounding at poor Sevastopol for eleven months. Its once graceful squares and broad boulevards were mostly rubble. Only the endless obstinacy and heroism of the simple Russian soldiers had prevented the place from being taken a dozen times.