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
Читать онлайн книгу.
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 and carefully, fondling her and murmuring nonsense in her ear, and then her arms went round my neck.
Frankly, I think the Count had under-estimated her horse artillery husband, for she had learned a great deal from somewhere. I’d been prepared for her to be reluctant, or to need some jollying along, but she entered into the spirit of the thing like a tipsy widow, and it was from no sense of duty or giving the house of Pencherjevsky its money’s worth that I stayed until past four o’clock. I do love a bouncy blonde with a hearty appetite, and when I finally crawled back to my own chilly bed it was with the sense of an honest night’s work well done.
But if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing well, and since there seemed to be an unspoken understanding that the treatment should be continued, I made frequent forays to Valla’s room in the ensuing nights. And so far as I’m a judge, the little baggage revelled in being a dutiful daughter – they’re a damned randy lot, these Russians. Something to do with the cold weather, I dare say. A curious thing was, I soon began to feel as though we were truly married, and no doubt this had something to do with the purpose behind our night games; yet during the day we remained on the same easy terms as before, and if Sara grudged her niece the pleasuring she was getting, she never let on. Pencherjevsky said nothing, but from time to time I would catch him eyeing us with sly satisfaction, fingering his beard at the table head.
East suspected something, I’m certain. His manner to me became nervous, and he avoided the family’s society even more than before, but he didn’t dare say anything. Too scared of finding his suspicions well grounded, I suppose.
The only fly in the ointment that I could see was the possibility that during the months ahead it might become apparent that I was labouring in vain; however, I was ready to face Pencherjevsky’s disappointment when and if it came. Valla’s yawns at breakfast were proof that I was doing my share manfully. And then something happened which made the whole speculation pointless.
From time to time in the first winter months there had been other guests at the big house of Starotorsk: military ones. The nearest township – where I’d encountered Ignatieff – was an important army head-quarters, a sort of staging post for the Crimea, but as there was no decent accommodation in the place, the more important wayfarers were in the habit of putting up with Pencherjevsky. On these occasions East and I were politely kept in our rooms, with a Cossack posted in the corridor, and our meals sent up on trays, but we saw some of the comings and goings from our windows – Liprandi, for example, and a grandee with a large military staff whom East said was Prince Worontzoff. After one such visit it was obvious to both of us that some sort of military conference had been held in the Count’s library – you could smell it the next morning, and there was a big map easel leaned up in a corner that hadn’t been there before.
“We should keep our eyes and ears open,” says East to me later. “Do you know – if we could have got out of our rooms when that confabulation was going on, we might have crept into the old gallery up yonder, and heard all kinds of useful intelligence.”
This was a sort of screened minstrel’s gallery that overlooked the library; you got into it by a little door off the main landing. But it was no welcome suggestion to me, as you can guess, who am all for lying low.
“Rot!” says I. “We ain’t spies – and if we were, and the whole Russian general staff were to blab their plans within earshot, what could we do with the knowledge?”
“Who knows –” says he, looking keen. “That Cossack they put to watch our doors sleeps half the night – did you know? Reeking of brandy. We could get out, I daresay – I tell you what, Flashman, if another high ranker comes this way, I think we’re bound to try and overhear him, if we can. It’s our duty.”
“Duty?” says I, alarmed. “Duty to eavesdrop? What kind of company have you been keeping lately? I can’t see Raglan, or any other honourable man, thinking much of that sort of conduct.” The high moral line, you see; deuced handy sometimes. “Why, we’re as good as guests in this place.”
“We’re prisoners,” says he, “and we haven’t given any parole. Any information we can come by is a legitimate prize of war – and if we heard anything big enough it might even be worth trying a run for it. We’re not that far from the Crimea.”
This was appalling. Wherever you go, however snug you may have made yourself, there is always one of these duty-bound, energetic bastards trying to make trouble. The thought of spying on the Russians, and then lighting out in the snow some dark night, with Pencherjevsky’s Cossacks after us – my imagination was in full flight in a trice, while Scud stood chewing his Up, muttering his thoughtful lunacies. I didn’t argue – it would have looked bad, as though I weren’t as eager to