Flashman Papers 3-Book Collection 3: Flashman at the Charge, Flashman in the Great Game, Flashman and the Angel of the Lord. George Fraser MacDonald
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before topping up another bumper of brandy, and drinking sneering toasts to “the blessed happy couple”, as he called them.
Then, exactly a week after Valla’s husband had gone back – with no very fond leave-taking from his little spouse, it seemed to me – I was sitting yawning in the salon over a Russian novel, when Aunt Sara came in, and asked if I was bored. I was mildly surprised, for she seldom said much, or addressed one directly. She looked me up and down, with no expression on that fine horse face, and then said abruptly:
“What you need is a Russian steam-bath. It is the sovereign remedy against our long winters. I have told the servants to make it ready. Come.”
I was idle enough to be game for anything, so I put on my tulup,o and followed her to one of the farthest outbuildings, beyond the house enclosure; it was snowing like hell, but a party of the servants had a great fire going under a huge grille out in the snow, and Aunt Sara took me inside to show me how the thing worked. It was a big log structure, divided down the middle by a high partition, and in the half where we stood was a raised wooden slab, like a butcher’s block, surrounded by a trench in the floor. Presently the serfs came in, carrying on metal stretchers great glowing stones which they laid in the trench; the heat was terrific, and Aunt Sara explained to me that you lay on the slab, naked, while the minions outside poured cold water through openings at the base of the wall, which exploded into steam when it touched the stones.
“This side is for men-folk,” says she. “Women are through there” – and she pointed to a gap in the partition. “Your clothes go in the sealed closet on the wall, and when you are ready you lie motionless on the slab, and allow the steam to envelop you.” She gave me her bored stare. “The door is bolted from within.” And off she went, to the other side of the partition.
Well, it was something new, so I undressed and lay on the slab, Aunt Sara called out presently from beyond the partition, and the water came in like Niagara. It hissed and splashed on the stones, and in a twinkling the ‘place was like London fog, choking, scalding, and blotting you in, and you lay there gasping while it sweated into you, turning you scarlet. It was hellish hot and clammy, but not unpleasant, and I lay soaking in it; by and by they pumped in more water, the steam gushed up again, and I was turning over drowsily on my face when Aunt Sara’s voice spoke unexpectedly at my elbow.
“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, glowering 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 Tsar 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.p You have a son, eh? A sturdy fellow? Good. I could wish 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 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 love 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