'Lie still,' says she, and peering -through the mist, I saw that she was wrapped in a clinging sheet, with her long, dark hair hanging in wet strands on either side of that strong, impassive face. I suddenly choked with what East would have called dark thoughts; she was carrying a bunch of long birch twigs, and as she laid a hot, wet hand on my shoulder she muttered huskily: 'This is the true benefit of the baths; do not move.'
And then, in that steam-heat, she began to birch me, very lightly at first, up the backs of my legs and to my shoulders, and then back again, harder and harder all the time, until I began to yelp. More steam came belching up, and she turned me over and began work on my chest and stomach. I was fairly interested by now, for mildly painful though it was, it was distinctly stimulating.
'Now, for me,' says she, and motioned me to get up and take the birches. 'Russian ladies often use nettles,' says she, and for once her voice was unsteady. 'I prefer the birch—it is stronger.' And in a twinkling she was out of her sheet and face down on the slab. I was having a good gloat down at that long, strong, naked body, when the damned serfs blotted everything out with steam again, so I lashed away through the murk, belabouring her vigorously; she began to moan and gasp, and I went at it like a man possessed, laying on so that the twigs snapped, and as the steam cleared again she rolled over on her back, mouth open and eyes staring, and reached out to seize hold of me, pumping away at me and gasping:
'Now! Now! For me! Pajalsta! I must have! Now! Pajalsta!'
Now, I can recognize a saucy little flirt when I see one, so I gave her a few last thrashes and leaped aboard, nearly bursting. God, it must have been months—so in my perversity, I had to tease her, until she dragged me down, sobbing and scratching at my back, and we whaled away on that wet slab, with the steam thundering round us, and she writhed and grappled fit to dislocate herself, until I began to fear we would slither off on to the hot stones. And when I lay there, utterly done, she slipped away and doused me with a bucket of cold water—what with one thing and another, I wonder I survived that bath.
Mind you, I felt better for it; barbarians they may be, but the Russians have some excellent institutions, and I remain grateful to Sara—undoubtedly my favourite aunt.
I supposed, in my vanity, that she had just proposed our steam-bath romp to help pass the winter, but there was another reason, as I discovered the following day. It was a bizarre, unbelievable thing, really, to people like you and me, but in feudal Russia—well, I shall tell you.
It was after the noon meal that Pencherjevsky invited me to go riding with him. This wasn't unusual, but his manner was; he was curt and silent as we rode—if it had been anyone but this hulking tyrant, I'd have said he was nervous. We rode some distance from the house, and were pacing our beasts through the silent snow-fields, when he suddenly began to talk—about the Cossacks, of all things. He rambled most oddly at first, about how they rode with bent knees, like jockeys ( which I'd noticed anyway), and how you could tell a Ural Cossack from the Black Sea variety because one wore a sheepskin cap and the other the long string-haired bonnet. And how the flower of the flock were his own people, the Zaporozhiyan Cossacks, or Kubans, who had been moved east to new lands near Azov by the Empress generations ago, but he, Pencherjevsky, had come back to the old stamping-ground, and here he would stay, by God, and his family after him forever.
'The old days are gone,' says he, and I see him so clearly still, that huge bulk in his sheepskin tulup, hunched in his saddle, glowerin with moody, unseeing eyes across the white wilderness, with the blood-red disc of the winter sun behind him. 'The day of the great Cossack, when we thumbed our noses at T'sar and Sultan alike, and carried our lives and liberty on our lance-points. We owed loyalty to none but our comrades and the hetman we elected to lead us—I was such a one. Now it is a new Russia, and instead of the hetman we have rulers from Moscow to govern the tribe. So be it. I make my place here, in my forefathers' land, I have my good estate, my moujiks, my land—the inheritance for the son I never sired.' He looked at me. 'I would have had one- Like you, a tall lancer fit to ride at the head of his own sotnia* (*Company, band.) You have a son, eh? A sturdy fellow? Good. I could it were not so—that you had no wife in England, no son, nothing to bind you or call you home. I would say to you then: 'Stay with us here. Be as a son to me. Be a Husband to my daughter, and get yourself a son, and me and a grandson, who will follow after us, and hold our land here, in this new Russia, this empire born of storm, where only a man who is a man can hope to plant himself and his seed and endure.' That is what I would say.'
Well, it was flattering, no question, although I might have pointed out to him that Valla had a husband already, and even if I'd been free and willing ..-. but it occurred to me that he probably Wasn't the man to let a little thing like that stand in the way. Morrison may not have been much of a father-in-law , but this chap would have been less comfortable still.
'As it is,' he growled on, 'I have a son-in-law—you saw what kind of a thing he is. God knows how any daughter of mine could … but there. I have doted on her, and indulged her, for her dear mother's sake—aye, and because I loves her. And if he was the last man I would have chosen for her—well, she cared for him, and I thought, their sons will have my blood, they may be Cossacks, horse-and-lance men, grandchildren to be proud of. But I have no grandsons—he gets me none!'
And he growled and spat and then swung round to face me. For a moment he wrestled with his tongue, and couldn't speak, and then it came out in a torrent.
'There must be a man to follow me here! I am too old now, there are no children left in me, or I would marry again. Valla, my lovely child, is my one hope—but she is tied to this … this empty thing, and I see her going childless to her grave. Unless …' He was gnawing at his lip, and his face was terrific. 'Unless … she can bear me a grandson. It is all I have to live for! To see a Pencherjevsky who will take up this inheritance when I am gone—be his father who he will, so long as he is a man! It cannot be her husband, so . . If it is an offence against God, against the Church, against the law—I am a Cossack, and we were here before God or the Church or the law! I do not care! I will see a male grandchild of mine to carry my line, my name, my land—and if I burn in hell for it, I shall count it worth the cost! At least a Pencherjevsky shall rule here—what I have built will not be squandered piecemeal among the rabble of that fellow's knock-kneed relatives! A man shall get my Valla a son!'
I'm not slow on the uptake, even with a bearded baboon nearly seven feet tall roaring at my face from a few inches away, and what I understood from this extraordinary outburst simply took my breath away. I'm all for family, you understand, but I doubt if I have the dynastic instinct as strong as all that.
'You are such a man,' says he, and suddenly he edged his horse even closer, and crushed my arm in his enormous paw. 'You can get sons—you have done so,' he croaked, his livid face beside mine. 'You have a child in England—and Sara has proved you also. When the war is over, you will leave here, and go to England, far away. No one will ever know—but you and I!'
I found my voice, and said something about Valla.
'She is my daughter,' says he, and his voice rasped like an iron file. 'She knows what this means to the house of Pencherjevsky. She obeys.' And for the first time he smiled, a dreadful, crooked grin through his beard. 'From what Sara tells me, she may be happy to obey. As for you, it will be no hardship. And'—he took me by the shoulder, rocking me in the saddle—'it may be worth much or little, but hereafter you may call Pencherjevsky from the other side of hell, and he will come to your side!'
If it was an extraordinary proposition, I won't pretend it was unwelcome. Spooky, of course, but immensely flattering, after all. And you only had to imagine, for a split second, what Pencherjevsky's reaction would have been to a polite refusal—I say no more.
'It will be a boy,' says he, 'I know it. And if by chance it is a girl—then she shall have a man for a husband, if I have to rake the world for him!'
An impetuous fellow, this Count—it never occurred to him that it might be his little Valla who was barren, and not her husband. However, that was not for me to say, so I kept mum, and left all the arrangements to papa.
He did it perfectly, no doubt with the connivance of that lustful slut Sara—there was a lady who took pleasure in her experimental work, all right. I sallied forth at midnight, and feeling not unlike a prize bull at the agricultural show—''ere 'e is, ladies'n' gennelmen, Flashman Buttercup the Twenty-first of Horny Bottom Farm'—tip-toed out of the corridor where my room and East's lay, and set off on the long promenade to the other wing. It was ghostly in that creaky old house, with not a soul about, but true love spurred me on, and sure enough Valla's door was ajar, with a little sliver of light lancing across the passage floor.
I popped in—and she was kneeling beside the bed, praying! I didn't know whether it was for forgiveness for the sin of adultery, or for the sin to be committed successfully, and I didn't stop to ask. There's no point in talking, or hanging back shuffling on these occasions, and saying: 'Ah … well, shall we …?' On the other hand, one doesn't go roaring and ramping at respectable married women, so I stooped and kissed her very gently, drew off her nightdress, and eased her on to the bed. I felt her plump little body trembling under my hands, so I kissed her long
