The Summer Day is Done (52 page)

I love you. Sweetest and most beautiful Grand Duchess, I love you. God be with you. John Kirby
.

Olga sat there on the bed. The room was freezing. The world outside was brittle with hard, glittering frost, the voices of Anastasia and Marie high and clear with the resilience of the young.

He had not forgotten them, after all. He had not forgotten her. Nor was he lying in an icy grave in bleak, wintry Armenia. He was on his way to her.

Olga Nicolaievna smiled, her eyes huge pools of blue in her pale face. The letter in its preciousness she hugged to her body as she went down the stairs and out into the frosty yard. Tatiana looked up from the snow they were all helping to build into a huge pile to keep themselves warm.

What did it matter if the guards were so moody and unfriendly today when her dearest sister looked so happy?

They were in Western Siberia with the White Army, the formidable Czech Legion spearheading the counter-revolutionary war against the Reds.

Karita was as hard as delicately tempered steel, Kirby as lean and bitter as a starved wolf. They had left Kars in late January and, with a motley collection of Bolshevik-hating ex-Imperial Army men, joined forces with the Czech Legion. They themselves were in an improvised cavalry unit of four hundred, and the horses they rode they had had to buy. Mostly the unit was comprised of Kuban Cossacks, who foresaw anonymity clothing
their nation under Bolshevism, but Karita was not the only woman who rode with them. There were other Amazons only too willing to fight the Reds. And Karita not only had her rifle, she had a nose for Reds. She could smell them a mile away.

She always had one question for strangers she did not like the smell of.

‘What would you do, my friend, if you had the Tsar in your hands?’

They either replied stupidly or with hatred.

She turned her back on the stupid ones. She blew off the heads of the others. She had Tartar blood in her veins and appointed herself the executioner of all those who dealt in violence and hatred. They were destroying the Russia she loved, repaying injustice with worse injustice. She knew the kind of Russia they wanted. Well, some of them would not live to enjoy it, she sent them to discuss it with their ancestors.

She wore a Cossack uniform, including baggy trousers and boots, much to the roaring delight of her Kuban comrades. She had acquired a sabre to go with her British Lee–Enfield. She kept the sabre sharp, the rifle clean. She made good use of both weapons. If she and the other women were not allowed to attack Bolsheviks head-on, they were always there when the men had the Reds running. But sometimes it was harder to survive the admiration of the Cossacks than the dangers of anything else. Sometimes it was even necessary to shout for Colonel Kirby. They had a respect for Colonel Kirby, not because he was for their Tsar but because Karita had told them
he was related to the King of England. That was something to Kuban Cossacks. They were admirers of Imperial power.

Ivan Ivanovich worried her a little. He had become so hard and so obsessed by the need to reach the Imperial family before it was too late. He had lost his good humour, his tolerance, his smile. She was horrified at the risks he sometimes took when they were smashing Bolshevik infiltrators out of villages or towns. She harangued him passionately on occasions.

‘Will you let the scum of Russia take your life? Don’t you ever think of what’s to become of me?’

‘You’ll survive.’ His brusqueness was typical of his moods now.

‘Oh, yes, I’ll survive and you’ll fight your way through a whole Red army, I suppose. And I’ll have to follow on to bury each little piece of you until only your stupid head is left.’

‘Stop wagging your tongue,’ he said, ‘use your bottom instead. Put it on your horse. We’re moving.’

‘There’s no need to be improper,’ said Karita icily.

He stared at her. She had survived vicious Reds and amorous Cossacks, she lived each day within earshot of blaspheming men and she had seen sights he did not care to think about. Yet here she was acting the prim puss of the drawing room.

‘For God’s sake,’ he said impatiently. He was consumed night and day by urgency and fear. Any advance was always too slow, and every
Bolshevik who stood in his way he wished to hell. He had neither time nor inclination for the kind of conversation he and Karita had had in the past.

‘Aunt Charlotte would blush to hear you speak like this,’ she said.

‘She’d blush for you. You look like a thieving Cossack.’

‘Oh, yes, a nice clean skirt would be better, wouldn’t it?’ She was furious with him. ‘Aunt Charlotte would like that, of course, with every man leering at my legs and petticoats.’

He smiled then. Karita, tanned by sun and wind and ice, her golden hair plaited and bound, smiled too.

‘Come on,’ he said.

If she sometimes worried about him, he sometimes wondered about her. Whenever prisoners were taken Karita, unforgiving in her contempt for those who were turning Russians against Russians, sons against fathers, disclosed a streak of cruelty. She could watch without pity as the Cossacks put many captives to slow death. It was an anguished dance the Bolsheviks performed in the middle of a village before the Kubans finally dismembered them or broke their limbs and knotted them around their necks. Karita could smile at such things, her eyes burning.

Kirby, hating the cold, fanatical face of Bolshevism, the creed of men dedicated to the political liquidation of millions, did not care much whether men like these were executed or not. But he did not like torture for its own sake.
He did several captives a good turn by shooting them as soon as they began their tormented writhing. This displeased his Cossack friends, but he was an Englishman with an Englishman’s eccentricities which they humoured, though sometimes with a scowl.

Advancing towards Western Siberia, the White Russian units were incorporated into the Czech command, and from then on had the umbrella of organized Czech efficiency to protect them from their own waywardness. But although the combined Czech and White Russian force began to hammer opposition into the ground with increasing speed, nothing satisfied the hurry Kirby was in. He had been blown up by the Germans in Poland and had been fortunate to survive the campaign in Armenia and his year as a prisoner of the Turks. Now he had more luck than a cat with nine lives. Stiffened by the Czechs, the White Russians were more formidable, the Cossacks more savage, and Kirby rode with them as they hurled themselves at Reds like the intoxicated Assassins of Hasan-i-Sabah. His disregard of risks and his apparent indifference to them appealed to men to whom life was not something to cling on to at the expense of so much else.

The Czech Legion, made up of fifty thousand men who had deserted from the Austro-Hungarian forces, had been promised safe conduct across Russia by the Bolsheviks. They had intended to join the Allies in the continuing war against the Germans. But at station after station the Czechs received anything but help
from local Soviets. The Soviets had already taken on the trappings of riddling intolerance and bureaucracy that they had disliked so much under Tsarism.

Finally, the Czechs, sensing treachery, took matters into their own hands. They struck first. Disciplined, well organized and well led, they were the real power behind the campaign to shove Bolshevism back into the obscene obscurity from which it had sprung. By the spring of 1918 they had helped to turn over the eastern half of Russia to White control.

They drove on into Western Siberia, towards Tobolsk, Kirby feverish now. He almost loved the Czechs for their inspired tactics, for their masterly and imaginative flanking movements which enabled them to isolate objectives and then easily reduce them. Russians would have gone for a massed frontal attack every time. The Czechs would take Tobolsk their own way, minimizing the Reds’ chances of removing the Imperial family in time.

They had fought through ice and snow, then through rain and howling wind. They had seen Russia at its most fearsome, but there was a day at last that was warm and sunny. It was a day when Karita and Kirby came close to quarrelling. It was late April. The Russians were saddling horses, men spitting and coughing, clearing their throats. Kirby was bristly and dark; the bitterness of civil war, of fighting that had no end, combined with anxieties that never left him, had hardened him body and soul. He was tightening the saddle girth when Karita, the
skirt of her coat frayed and worn, her Cossack-style hat swinging in her hand, came up to speak to him.

Not for the first time she asked him how his head was. It was no wonder, she said, that he’d been captured by the Turks when he always went into action with his head empty. He, for the first time, told her to shut up.

She flushed with anger.

‘That,’ she said, ‘is the voice of a very empty head. I know what will happen to you, you’ll reach the Imperial family without any head at all. But what will it matter? You don’t use it, anyway.’

His eyes glittered. He wore an old coat over a patchwork of garments that had comprised a reasonable uniform when he left Kars. His trousers were tucked into black boots. He looked intense, impatient.

‘What are you complaining about?’ he said. ‘I don’t complain about you. If I lose my head, that’s my worry. If you turn into a savage, that’s yours.’

‘Savage? Who is a savage?’ she cried.

‘You are. You gloat over the agonies of men.’

Kubans leading horses down the village street grinned to see Karita Katerinova in fury at her Englishman.

‘Men! They aren’t men!’ She was loudly scathing. ‘They’re animals. Do you know what they’re doing to our people? Hanging them, shooting them, burying them alive! You wish me to laugh about this? You wish me to be kind to them? You want them to die so that they don’t feel
anything? They are animals who demand that we betray our own mothers, who have brought hatred to the whole of Russia and say it’s for the good of Russia. What is good about that?’

‘Nothing,’ he said, ‘but shut up.’

‘I’m to say nothing when you call me a savage?’ Karita could have wept with fury, with unhappiness. ‘What a fine thing that is, coming from someone who is supposed to be related to the King of England!’

‘And who is supposed to be that?’

‘Well, do you think I could tell the Kubans you were nobody?’ she said, angrily scornful. ‘They would probably have murdered you long ago if you had been. It would have made me look a nobody too, they’d have cooked me for supper. I’m disgusted with you. Never would I have let you take me away from my parents if I’d known you would call me names – oh, a fine father and mother you are to me!’

His irritation vanished. He gave a shout of laughter. Watching Kubans grinned happily to see him kiss her on the nose and slap her bottom. But it did not mollify Karita. She was bitterly disappointed in him. She knew he was suffering because of the Imperial family, but so was she. And what with so many other things her nerves were constantly at breaking point. He was always trying to get himself killed. That would be fine for him, he would be peacefully dead, but what about her? She would have to go back to her parents and either be a servant to some village headman now that all the aristocrats had been murdered, or marry some Crimean wine-treader
who never wore clean clothes except on Sundays. The thought made her shudder. It had only been by the merest accident and her own intuition that she hadn’t married that infamous Oravio.

And now Ivan Ivanovich thought her a savage. She looked at him with hot and angry brown eyes, turned on her heels with a swirl of her skirted coat and went to saddle her own horse.

‘Kill yourself, then!’ she called over her shoulder. ‘Get your head blown off!’

‘Karita! Come back!’

She heard the insistence of the command. She would have gone on with angry strides but suddenly thought of her mother. Her mother would be horrified. She was bound in service to Ivan Ivanovich. Under no circumstances would her mother have permitted her to defy him. She stopped. She heard his footsteps behind her. The unit of cavalry was beginning to mill up and down the dirt surface of the village street. Villagers were coming out, some offering the men what food they could spare. The Cossacks grinned and asked for wine.

‘Karita.’ His voice was kind. His hands on her shoulders turned her round. His face was burned by the wind, his eyes tender. ‘Forgive me, Karita. Everything I said was unkind. Everything is my own fault. I think too much of other things and not enough of you. It would be a sorry day if you and I came to blows. There’s too much of it going on all over Russia now without my bad temper inciting more of it. There, I’m sorry. Am I forgiven?’

Karita was mortified. She had been ungenerous. She looked at the fur hat she held. It had been glossy once. In an excess of unusual embarrassment she spent the next few moments tugging it on over her head. Then she said, ‘Ivan Ivanovich, it’s only that I don’t want you to get yourself killed. Oh, as if we would fight each other, you and I. But it’ll be better when all this is over and we can go to England again. You don’t shout at me there.’

The quaint absurdity of this nearly had him laughing again. But Karita was in such obvious seriousness that he knew she would not take kindly to any lack of it in himself at this moment.

‘England is a long way off in more ways than one, Karita.’

‘But when we take Tobolsk,’ said Karita, ‘that will bring it a great deal nearer.’

‘Yes, it will,’ he said, ‘for us and for them, I hope.’

He put his arm around her, squeezed her.

Tobolsk fell to the Czechs and the Whites two days later. They made wide, sweeping thrusts that pincered the town. Pounded and pulverized, the defending Reds broke and fled in panic, knowing only too well how the Whites dealt with prisoners they suspected of being active Bolsheviks. The cavalry burst upon the fleeing Reds. Karita lost Kirby in the smoke and confusion. She found him later. The Czechs were pouring into the town and the Cossacks were playing murderous tag with Bolsheviks around the streets and houses. Amid
all the wild movement Kirby, dismounted, stood with two other officers in the centre of the town. They were talking to a frightened civilian.