The Golden Sabre

‘A foreigner, Miss Eden. He has a motor car—’ Nikolai Petrovitch Yurganov was a young man convinced already that he would not last to be old. He was a Cossack from the Don who had come east to avoid the fighting and carousing that had been his family’s main pursuits. He had pale brown hair, already starting to thin, a long bony face, a body to match it and a soft girlish voice. He had a pathological fear of horses and one small glass of vodka stunned him like a blow with a rifle-butt. At his birth he had set the Cossack tradition back a millennium. ‘He drove in here a while ago. His tyres are punctured—’

Eden stood irresolute. In the nine months since Prince and Princess Gorshkov had gone off to Georgia she had had no major problems to face; the war was a long way from here and even General Bronevich’s soldiers had not come out of town to worry her and the children. Once she had been myopic to consequences, the essential talent for any sense of adventure; she would, if she lasted long enough, stand gasping with admiration for the sunrise on Judgement Day. But today’s letter from Princess Gorshkov had brought a sense of foreboding.

‘Can’t you get rid of him?’

Nikolai shook his head. ‘He won’t take any notice of me, Miss Eden – no one ever does—’

‘Oh damn!’ she said under her breath and, carrying her parasol, stalked across to the main barn and into its cool dim interior. She saw the strange truck at the rear of the barn, next to Prince Gorshkov’s car under its big canvas cover; then she saw the man in a blue shirt, bib-and-tucker overalls and a flat-crowned cowboy’s hat sitting on the running-board of the truck. ‘What are – Oh, it’s you!’

‘Well, well, if it isn’t the old handbag whirler—’ Cabell felt his bruised ear. ‘I’d like you beside me some time in a bar-room brawl.’

‘Just the sort of place where I spend most of my time.’ Why am I sounding so tart? She should be welcoming this man, whoever he was; he was the first non-Russian she had spoken to in over two years, ever since the Gorshkovs had fled St Petersburg for this estate. ‘I’m sorry, Mr–?’

‘Cabell.’

‘What are you doing here?’

Somehow he had suggested to her that he would be garrulous, as long-winded as Trotsky, whom she had once heard speak; instead, in what seemed to her no more than half a dozen sentences, he told her who he was and how he had arrived here in the Gorshkov barn. But even his brevity landed like a weight on her.

‘You can’t stay here! I have the children to think of—’

‘Miss Eden.’ Nikolai stood like a trembling shadow in the doorway of the barn. ‘There are horsemen coming up the avenue!’

‘Oh Jesus,’ said Cabell. ‘I better be going—’

‘Going where?’

‘I’ll try and make it out there to the wheat-fields. Maybe I can hide—’

‘Stay where you are.’ Even as her decision was forming in her mind she wondered why she was making it. Was it just because the man spoke English? Did her charity lie only in her ear? She could not imagine herself being so impulsive about helping a Russian. ‘Put the horses away, Nikolai. And keep your mouth shut – you know nothing, you understand?’

She went out again into the glare, opening her blue parasol and raising it against the golden brightness. As the half-dozen horsemen galloped into the broad area in front of the house, Frederick and Olga came running out of the front door. ‘What’s going on? Why the soldiers? Are we being attacked?’

‘Be quiet,’ Eden said, and looked up at the sergeant leaning down at her from his horse. She recognized the men for Siberian Cossacks, the worst of all Cossacks. They wore their karakul hats, dirty grey uniforms and expressions that made her quail inwardly; sabres hung in scabbards from their saddles and all of them had rifles. The horses, crowding in around her, looked as wild as the men. ‘To what do we owe this honour?’

The sergeant peered and leered at her, split between appreciating this rich plum of a girl and wondering what she was doing here. A Turkic-speaking gentleman, he also only vaguely understood what she had said to him in Russian. He straightened up and nodded to one of his younger soldiers.

‘Question her.’

The young soldier pressed his horse forward, likewise leered down at Eden. She felt she was being visually molested as the horsemen crowded round her; Nikolai had warned her what might happen if these Tartars took it into their heads to come out from Verkburg and pillage the estate. Now here they were and if they found the man they were looking for, God help him. And, what was worse, God help her and the children.

‘I am in charge here—’ said Frederick.

Eden hit him with her handbag and the soldiers laughed and cheered. Frederick drew himself up and almost got another whack with the handbag. ‘Shut up, Freddie. What can we do for you, corporal?’

‘We are looking for an American in a motor car—’

‘That must have been he who passed us and covered us in dust,’ said Olga.

‘Children should be seen and not heard,’ said Eden, trembling inside, seeing two of the soldiers now leering at Olga. ‘Of course it was he, who else could it have been?’ She looked up at the young corporal. ‘He was travelling north at a great speed, out there on the Ekaterinburg road. He went by us in a cloud of dust and disappeared up the road.’

The corporal conveyed this information to the sergeant, who peered and leered again at Eden. She and the children were still tightly encircled by the horsemen. She felt more threatened now than ever before in her life; somehow she felt more endangered now than in the Revolution riots two years ago in St Petersburg; even the flight from that city had not had any close moments of danger. These Tartars, savages on horseback, could do what they wanted with her and the children and there would be no one to stop them. The estate workers were too far away, the house servants were probably already cowering in the cellars; Nikolai, she knew, was a reliable coward and the American, who had brought these men here, was an unknown quantity. She felt suddenly overcome by fear and the heat and was ready to collapse. She would be unconscious when she was raped for the first time, which was probably the best way to be.

The sergeant straightened up, snapped something to his men in his own tongue and all six of them suddenly whirled their horses about and went galloping off down the avenue, disappearing like evaporating ghosts into the shadows of the poplars. Eden, halfway to fainting, came back to full consciousness.

‘Just as well they decided to go,’ said Frederick. ‘I’d have shot them with Father’s gun.’

‘Just what we need,’ Eden said to Olga. ‘A stupid twelve-year-old hero. We’d have all been dead before you could have loaded the gun.’

‘It’s already loaded,’ said Frederick. ‘I’ve had it loaded for weeks, just in case.’

‘I had mine ready, also just in case.’ Cabell came out of the barn carrying a Winchester rifle. ‘Those bastards looked—’

‘Mr Cabell, could you please moderate your language?’

Cabell took off his hat and inclined his head. ‘Sorry. I’ve been talking to myself for so long, I keep forgetting … Thanks, Miss Eden. You could have given me up to those guys, you know. I wouldn’t have blamed you.’

‘Never!’ Frederick was a one-boy defender against the invaders. ‘Those men are barbarians!’

‘Do be quiet, Freddie,’ said Eden. ‘Mr Cabell, where were you intending to go?’

‘I was heading for Ekaterinburg. But I’m not going to make it now – when I blew my tyres I bugg – messed up the wheels. I’ll have to go on foot, unless I can buy a horse from you.’

‘We shall sell you a horse,’ said Frederick. ‘We have dozens – Ouch!’

Eden hit him with her handbag, but did not give him a glance.

‘Mr Cabell, if you go by horse you will have to travel at night. They will be watching for you all the way to Ekaterinburg. As soon as those men get back to Verkburg they will send a message through on the telegraph to all the villages and towns between here and Ekaterinburg. These White armies do fight amongst themselves, but they also co-operate with each other sometimes. We’ll give you a horse and you can leave after dark.’

‘Miss Eden, you are a peach. And very resourceful, if I may say so.’

Eden blushed under the compliment and Olga said, ‘I love to hear a man compliment a woman. It is the way things should be.’

Cabell raised an eyebrow, then bowed. ‘At your service, Miss—’

‘Princess,’ said Olga. ‘Princess Olga Natasha Aglaida Gorshkov.’

‘I am Prince Frederick Mikhail Alexander Gorshkov,’ said Frederick, not to be out-ranked.

‘And I am plain Miss Eden Penfold.’

‘Not plain,’ said Cabell, smiling. ‘And I’m delighted to meet a fellow proletarian. As for you two aristocrats, buzz off while I talk to Miss Penfold.’

‘We stay,’ said the two aristocrats. ‘This is our house—’

Eden raised her handbag again, but Frederick and Olga moved back out of range. Cabell looked at the two children, then shrugged. ‘Okay. Are there any servants here besides that guy Nikolai?’

‘There are four in the house, but they can be trusted,’ said Eden. ‘It is the workers out in the fields I’m not sure about.’