Jasper Kent - Twelve

I had vowed then never to make the same mistake – never to walk away and be absent at the moment of a friend's death. And yet here today I had failed to keep that vow, as I would fail again. I could excuse myself of the practical cowardice of allowing the Oprichniki to take him, but there was no defence for my moral cowardice in not staying with him until the end. In any sense that mattered, I had left him to die alone. Worse still, he had known it.

It was morning when I arrived back in Moscow and, in the hours that I had been away, the mood of the city had changed beyond any imagining. The remnants of our army, which Vadim and I had overtaken so easily on the road from Borodino, were now arriving in the city. They were not arriving to regroup, not arriving to make a stand, but arriving because they had nowhere else to go. If they had feared that extra tens of thousands of soldiers would make the city overcrowded, they need not have. As the soldiers were entering, so the civilians were leaving – their confidence of months before in the unreachability of Moscow now vanished. The streets were awash with movement, always from the west, always to the east. Carts piled high with furniture, with fabrics, with silver and with gold, headed out of Moscow, their owners riding up front and keeping a careful eye on their possessions. On some, I could even see the owners, or as often their servants, spread across the goods on the cart like some many-legged spider, trying to keep a hand on every item, so that none might fall by the wayside to be gathered up by the advancing French, who, they were now certain, would soon arrive.

Behind the carts of the people of Moscow came the wagons carrying their wounded defenders. The casualties of Borodino filled any street of the city that was not already occupied by the departing citizens. As one lavishly appointed cartload of property left to the east, it made room for another to enter, loaded with the dying or even the dead. Where the two strata met, there was sometimes a mixing, sometimes a separation. Some of the citizens were repelled by the sight of those who had so bravely fought to defend them, others gladly unloaded their most treasured possessions to make a little room for one wounded soldier to be taken to safety. But while such self-sacrifice might save the life of a single man, it would remove only a drop from the ocean of humanity that was now pouring into the city.

And yet it was one more drop of humanity than I had managed to save that day.

I had no immediate desire to find Vadim and Dmitry. I would have no problem explaining to them why I had returned, against Vadim's instructions, without Maks, but I did not relish the doubting voice in my own head that I knew I must hear as I told them. Though why should I listen to that voice now? It had been happy enough to keep a cowardly silence back in Desna. A man's conscience shouts so much more loudly in the past tense than it ever manages to achieve in the present.

If I was not to see Vadim and Dmitry immediately, then there was only one other place in Moscow that I could go. My intention was simple enough. However cowardly and however shocking it might seem, those souls that were now fleeing the city were acting wisely, and I was going to ensure that Domnikiia would be one of them; to ensure that she had a safe place to go and to give her enough money to provide for her food and travel as she made her way there. At the back of my mind was the fear that the abandonment of Moscow might be the furthest thing possible from her inclination. As I pushed my way through the crowded streets, fending off those citizens unfortunate enough to be travelling on foot and pushing away the blindly searching hands of soldiers who lay dying on open carts, I realized that the city would soon be full of French soldiers; rich, victorious and, above all, amorous French soldiers. Domnikiia could make more from them in a day than she had done of late in a week from the crushed Muscovites. Would she, I wondered, find more popularity as the homely, French Dominique who could remind them of their sweethearts back in Paris or as the exotic, erotic and, most importantly, vanquished Russian Domnikiia? But I was, as I knew well by now, no judge of a Russian's patriotism. When I arrived, she was preparing to leave.

Although it was past one o'clock, well into the brothel's normal trading hours, I arrived to find the door closed and locked. I stepped back into the square and threw a stone up at Domnikiia's window. The window opened and out popped the head of Margarita Kirillovna.

'We're closed,' she snapped.

'Margarita!' I called. She screwed up her eyes as she tried to recognize me. 'Is Domnikiia there?'

Her head disappeared and the window closed again. I waited. Minutes later, I heard the bolts being drawn back at the door. This time, the face that half peeped outside was Domnikiia's. I went over and tried to kiss her, but she smoothly avoided it, beckoning me hurriedly inside and bolting the door behind me. Within, I encountered one of the most beautiful visions of chaos I could ever have imagined. The salon was a mélange of beautiful girls packing their beautiful clothes into trunks, which, though relatively plain, somehow managed to assimilate the beauty of what was going on around them. There were eight girls working at the brothel, and although I had a heart only for one, I had eyes for them all. In their demure, controlled, professional allure they were a temptation to the most puritan of men. In their natural, girlish panic their charm was only augmented by their vitality.

I followed Domnikiia up to her room, where a large trunk took centre stage, half filled with clothes. Margarita came back and forth from her room, adding new layers of attire to the trunk, and as soon as we entered the room, Domnikiia strode over to her wardrobe and began to do the same. She had not spoken a word to me since I had arrived.

As she passed me, I grabbed her wrist and pulled her to me, but this time it was I who aborted our kiss. I had not seen before, since it had been hidden by the door earlier and by her avoiding my direct gaze since, that she had bruises on her right eye and on her high, round cheek. Her upper lip was split just below her right nostril and though it was not a fresh wound, it still oozed blood from where she had reopened it trying to smile. On her jaw I could also see, now I looked closely, the faint bruising of where she had been held by a large, brutal hand.

Although the very conception made me for a moment despise myself more even than I did her assailant, I felt a thrill of attraction for her run through me that was greater than anything I had felt towards her before. Her beauty was accentuated, not hidden, by the vulnerability endowed upon her by those wounds.

I kissed her lips as lightly as I dared, not wanting to hurt her physically, but neither wanting to suggest any diminution of my passion for her as a consequence of these blemishes.

'Who did this to you?'

'I asked you who Dmitry was,' she replied acerbically. 'I found out.'

'He did this?' I tried to sound disbelieving, but just as I was in my heart of hearts unsurprised by the discovery that Maks had been a spy, so I was unsurprised to find that Dmitry could treat a woman like that for his own ends. I'd never known him do it in the past – but there was no inconsistency I could find between the action and what I knew of his character. 'He wanted to know where Maks was, I suppose.'

She didn't answer, but buried her face in my chest and began to cry. Her self-imposed silence so far had been out of fear that she would be unable to control herself. Now she had told me the one important fact that she had to convey, she indulged herself in the pleasure of the abandonment of self-control, and indulged me in the pleasure of being her comforter. Yet she still had one more thing to tell me.