Looking behind me along the great train of vehicles, I caught sight of the three covered wagons that Pyetr Pyetrovich had used to evacuate his 'assets' from Moscow. He sat at the front of the first coach, next to the driver. Behind him, in the shade of the canopy, I could just make out a face that I knew to be Domnikiia's. I spent most of the long journey simply staring towards her.

My own carriage contained quite a mixture of people – old and young, some families – none that I felt much urge to converse with. I remember on the afternoon of our fourth day of travel, as I caught my first glimpse of the towers and domes of my beloved city, a mother sitting next to me was just finishing off telling a folk story to her two young children, bringing back memories of my own childhood. I looked at the approaching city for only a few minutes before turning back to gaze once again at Domnikiia.

The story that the mother was vividly telling her children had been one of my grandmother's favourites, and one of her strangest and, despite its simplicity, most frightening. It was about a town in the south called Uryupin, and I listened idly, comforted in the memory of my fears as a child which now seemed so utterly insignificant.

'After the traveller and his creatures had gone, everyone rejoiced,' she recounted, her voice rising to match the rejoicing, 'but soon people began to notice that something was wrong.' She bent towards her children conspiratorially, and her voice lowered.

'The town was quiet – so quiet that you could have heard the sound of a farmer sowing poppy seed.' The children smiled up at her, anticipating the ending of a story they had heard many times before.

'In the end, it was a little boy, just about your age, Grisha,' she said to her son, 'who understood what was wrong. It was so quiet because there was no birdsong. The traveller's pets had eaten not only the rats, but all of the birds in the village too.

'And to this day, you know, not one of them has come back.'

PART TWO

CHAPTER XVIII

IT WAS A SUNDAY WHEN I ARRIVED BACK IN MOSCOW. I WAS GLAD to have seen the city at its worst, for now, although it was still in a sorry state, I could at least see that there was some improvement. For those like Domnikiia and most of the populace, who had left before the French had even arrived, the contrast with now must have been heartbreaking. They had last seen a city still at the height of its physical splendour, still with the lifeblood of its people flowing through its streets, even though at that time they were flowing out of the city. When I had last seen Moscow, two-thirds of it had been razed by fire, a fraction of the population remained and the streets were filled only with occupying French soldiers.

Today, two-thirds of the city was still destroyed by fire. No surprise for me, but a horror to many others who returned, particularly if they returned to find it was their home that had been destroyed. Today, there were no French in the city, neutral for those who had never seen the French, but an improvement for me, who had. Today, the population was still small, but larger than at its worst and increasing all the time. For those who had seen it full, the city was still empty. For me, it was not yet full, but at least it was filling.

Thus I must have cut an eccentric figure that day. While most of the returning Muscovites wore faces of haggard shock and shuffled around contemplating the enormity of the task of rebuilding – both personally and civically – that lay before them, I strode about with the evident pleasure of a voyager revisiting a beautiful town that he has not seen for many years.

Even so, my face must have become indistinguishable from those around it when I first laid eyes on the horror that had befallen the Kremlin. It had been spared the fires of the first days of Bonaparte's occupation, thanks largely to the efforts of the French themselves to protect it as the richest jewel in the crown that they had captured. But on his departure, Bonaparte had instructed that the citadel should be mined and destroyed so that we could not reclaim that which he could not keep. There could be no military justification for it, as there might possibly have been for the fires that dogged the French when they first took the city; it was mere petulance.

Luck, however, having chosen that autumn of 1812 to desert Bonaparte, had deserted him completely. The Kremlin was not destroyed. Perhaps his subordinates had been half-hearted in executing so churlish an order. Perhaps the rain had dampened the fuses. Whatever the cause, few of the charges had ignited. But whatever relief Muscovites might have felt that the Kremlin was saved, it was still a misery to see the damage that had been done. Facing Red Square, everything between the Arsenal and the Saint Nicholas Tower was gone, along with several other towers stretching down towards the river. Venturing within, I saw that the Palace of the Facets had collapsed. Worst of all, the great golden cross that had once topped the Ivan the Great Bell Tower was gone. It had not been destroyed in any explosion, but dragged to the ground and carted off as part of Bonaparte's plunder.

Sad though it was to witness the mutilation caused by the departure of the French, I counted myself as fortunate to have missed the brief trough of anarchy into which the remaining population of Moscow had descended in the twenty-four hours after the French had left. What I heard of it was disheartening enough. A crowd had marched on the Foundlings' Home, where there were no longer to be found orphans, but hundreds of French wounded who were too weak to be moved. Few survived the wrath of the mob, though their deaths were quicker than those of many of their comrades who had been able to walk out into the slow, freezing mortality of the Russian winter. Had the mob's only actions been those of vengeance, then they might have been attributed to some misplaced sense of patriotism, but, so I was told, looting had become more rife than ever. Those supplies that should have been eked out between all Muscovites were grabbed by the strongest and most selfish. Fortunately, there were Russian troops under Prince Khonvansky near to the city, waiting for the French to leave, and so the period when no law – neither French nor Russian – reigned was mercifully brief. By the time I returned, civilization – if not civility – had long been restored.

The inn in Tverskaya where I usually stayed (when I wasn't frequenting stables and crypts) had at least in part survived the fires. Flames had consumed much of the block, and as many as half of the rooms had been destroyed, but its proprietors had already returned and were attempting to resurrect their business using those few rooms that remained habitable. I chatted to the innkeeper as he led me up to a dispiritingly humble room. (The set which I used to occupy was no more – the stairs that had once led up to it now led only to a precipice overlooking a wasteland of detritus and rubble.) He asked after Vadim, Dmitry and Maks. I told him they were all well, finding it easier simply to lie about Maks, but I gathered that he had not seen Vadim any more recently than I had.

There was little I could do to track down Vadim. When the French arrived he, like me, had gone underground. His skills at hiding himself from view might not have been the greatest in the world, but in a city the size of Moscow, there was nowhere I could even begin to search for him. All I could do was attend the same daily meeting points that we had arranged weeks before. It was a dim hope, but that was the last plan of action we had. However slim the chance, it was the best I had of finding him. On top of that, there was also the possibility that one or more of the Oprichniki might show up – a prospect that I viewed with some ambivalence.