‘I’m not a young man any more,’ he said sombrely. ‘The fighting at the front is going to be long and hard and I think it very likely, my darling, that I might not survive it.’
She gave an anguished cry of protest.
He ignored it, saying steadfastly, ‘Now do you understand why I want to see Katerina married before I leave again for the front?’
She nodded, tears glistening on her eyelashes. ‘And Major Zlarin?’ she said tremulously, ‘Will he be agreeable?’
‘I’ve already spoken with him and the answer is yes. Both his parents are dead. No feelings will be hurt at his marrying in such a manner, or at least no feelings that he cares about.’
Katerina felt as if a bottomless pit had opened at her feet and if she were about to fall headlong into it.
‘But, Papa …’ she said, appalled at his premonition that he would die on the battlefield; appalled at the prospect of marrying a near stranger in such haste. ‘We are not yet even officially engaged! And you won’t die! I know you won’t! When the war is over and when you return to Belgrade, then we can celebrate with a wedding!’
‘I doubt if this war is going to be over for years,’ Alexis said heavily. ‘And though I hope you are right and that I do return, I can’t help feeling the chances are very heavily against it. To see you married now, before I go away, will give me great peace of mind, Katerina.’
She was at the edge of the pit, beginning to slip. There was nothing she could say without revealing that she was not hopelessly in love with her bridegroom-to-be.
‘And Max?’ Zita was saying. ‘He will have to be told – and quickly.’
‘I’ll undertake that task,’ Alexis said, thankful the worst was over and that arrangements could now be made. ‘In ordinary circumstances he could have served as Zlarin’s best man, as it is he will probably not want to be in attendance at all.’
‘Then there will be a best man?’ Zita asked intensely relieved that the wedding wasn’t going to be quite as makeshift as Natalie’s had been. ‘And will Katerina have a bridesmaid to escort her to the cathedral?’
‘The wedding will be as traditional as we can make it in the time available,’ Alexis promised. ‘The problem is going to be bridesmaids. Everyone will no doubt flock back from Nish now that the city is free of Austrians, but there’s no telling just when Vitza and other family members will arrive.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Katerina said, grateful that there was at least one problem it was within her grasp to solve. ‘I would like Cissie to be my bridesmaid. I don’t need anyone else.’
‘Then the sooner you and Cissie get together with Helga and plan what you will wear, the better.’
Katerina and Zita stared at him, appalled.
As the expression on their faces registered on him he said sharply, ‘What is it? Has Helga been hurt?’
‘She’s dead,’ Zita said in a cracked voice. ‘She was shot in front of us. Executed as a traitor because she nursed Serbians.’
‘Dear God,’ Alexis whispered, his face taking on an ashen pallor as he drew them both close, realizing that he hadn’t come near to imagining what both of them had suffered.
During the next hectic few hours, as arrangements for her wedding
went ahead at breakneck pace, Katerina wondered if Natalie had felt the same mounting panic she was now feeling. She must have done, for she had had even less warning that she was to be married and her bridegroom hadn’t even been of her own choosing.
When Zita had suggested that under the circumstances she might like to break with tradition and speak with her bridegroom before the ceremony, Katerina had shaken her head emphatically. If she saw him she might panic totally. She was being coerced into nothing that wasn’t of her own choice. The pity was, that it wasn’t as she had imagined it would be.
She had anticipated that by the time they married they would have come to know each other well; that the war would be over; that Natalie would be in Belgrade and would be her chief bridesmaid.
As it was she was marrying with no more preparation than Natalie had done. Her mother had been unable to beg, borrow or steal a wedding gown and so she had said that she would wear one of her summer dresses. The dress she decided on was of white chiffon. It swirled floatingly around her ankles and she made it festive by pinning a small posy of white winter bud-roses to the bodice.
She left for the cathedral from the Konak. The streets were still thronged and word quickly spread that the bride was King Peter’s niece; that she had voluntarily stayed in the city throughout its occupation and was marrying the officer who had commanded the troops responsible for keeping Austro-Hungarian forces at bay all through September and October.
Accompanied all the way by cheers and shouted good wishes her carriage trundled through the bomb-cratered streets, the horses picking their way with infinite care.
As she stepped out of her carriage at the cathedral what looked to Katerina to be an entire division of soldiers were waiting to greet her. For the first time in months rifles and pistols were let off without deadly intention as they shot off volley after volley into the air, announcing her arrival in age-old fashion.
None of her family had yet arrived back in the city from Nish and she entered the cathedral knowing the only wedding guests would be her parents and a handful of Major Zlarin’s fellow officers. It was the near-emptiness of the imposing incense-filled interior that made the presence of the unexpected guest so instantly obvious.
He was stood facing the front of the cathedral, his back towards her.
Katerina’s hand tightened on her father’s arm. He had told her Max would not be at the ceremony. He had told her that he had told Max of her engagement and imminent marriage to Major Zlarin and that Max had taken the news with commendable stoicism.
She looked from the back of his head to where Major Zlarin was waiting for her. He, too, had his back firmly towards her. Suddenly the panic she had been fighting ever since she had known they were to be married so soon, convulsed her. She gasped and stumbled, only her father’s swift support preventing her from falling.
Max turned his head and looked towards her. As their eyes met she suddenly saw beyond his mask of infuriating brusqueness and rudeness. He was brusque and rude because beneath that bear-like façade he was cripplingly shy. She wondered why she hadn’t realized it before. Her mother had. Her mother had guessed the night he had come to say goodbye to them. Suddenly he no longer seemed repellent and odd; suddenly he seemed blessedly familiar and reassuring.
She looked away from him and towards her husband-to-be. His back was still firmly towards her, ramrod straight, far from familiar and light years away from being reassuring.
As she kept on walking, drawing nearer and nearer to him, it occurred to her for the first time that she was quite possibly making the biggest and most far-reaching mistake of her life.
Chapter Fourteen
Natalie had never missed or wanted her mother as much as she did when she was having the baby. She couldn’t believe how horrendous labour was. No-one had prepared her for it. When she had asked the family doctor what she might expect, he had said merely that he would take care of everything and that all she had to do was be ‘a good girl’. It was advice she had found singularly unhelpful. In theory she supposed that she could have asked her mother-in-law but in practice she would rather have gone kicking and screaming into hell. Diana, for all her nursing experience at Guy’s, had been utterly useless.
‘Wounded soldiers don’t have babies,’ she had said pragmatically. ‘All I know is that lashings of hot water and towels are necessary.’
‘What on earth for?’ Natalie had asked, her perplexity deepening. ‘I shan’t want a bath when I’m giving birth and the baby isn’t going to need vast quantities of bath water. It will probably be able to fit into a decent sized kitchen bowl.’
Diana, who knew less about kitchen bowls than she did midwifery, said reassuringly, ‘I shouldn’t worry about it. No-one els
e seems to. When the baby is ready to arrive it simply arrives and that’s all there is to it.’
As she lay in a specially prepared bedroom in her in-laws’house, Natalie knew from three hours painful experience that Diana had been exceedingly over optimistic. Other babies might very well arrive simply and uncomplicatedly. Hers wasn’t doing so.
‘How much longer is this going to go on?’ she demanded of the midwife. ‘I’ve been in labour for three hours now. Surely three hours is long enough for a baby to be born?’
‘Three hours is no time at all, Mrs Fielding,’ the midwife said in amusement. ‘The doctor has looked at you and he’s gone on his way. He wouldn’t have done so if he’d thought the birth was imminent.’
‘Gone on his way?’ Natalie forgot about the intermittent pain cramping her stomach and the intolerable ache in her lower back. She pushed herself up against the pillows. ‘What do you mean, “gone on his way”? He’s in the house, isn’t he?’
The midwife’s amusement deepened. Society mothers always had an inflated idea of their own importance and this one seemed to think she had been highly inconvenienced merely at having had to take to a bed.
‘Doctors are busy men, Mrs Fielding,’ she said patiently, busying herself laying out scissors and string and soap in readiness for the doctor’s eventual return. ‘And they are busier than ever now there are so many war-wounded. You need to rest and conserve your strength.’
Natalie stared at her in deepening horror. Conserve her strength? For what, for the Lord’s sake? If this wasn’t labour, what was?
During the next two hours she blamed her increasing misery on everyone she could think of. Julian, for having made her pregnant in the first place; his mother, for not having ensured she had a doctor who would have speeded events up a little; her father, for having insisted she leave Belgrade and persuading her that marriage to Julian was the best way of doing so; Gavrilo, for being responsible for her having to leave Belgrade; and Katerina, for not having physically prevented her from meeting him in the Golden Sturgeon.
‘We’re nearly there, Mrs Fielding,’ the doctor said encouragingly as she pushed and pushed, panting for air.
Natalie was glad to hear it. She was never going to have a baby again. The pain was vile, the indignity beyond all bearing.
‘And again, Mrs Fielding!’ the doctor exhorted cheerfully. ‘I can see the baby’s head! Easy now, try and relax.’
Through eyelashes beaded with perspiration Natalie shot him a look of pure venom. He was a certifiable madman. In Serbia it was customary for midwives to bring babies into the world unassisted by doctors and Natalie now understood why. No woman would have made such a ridiculous request at such a time. He might just as well have asked her to fly to the moon. Her body was out of her control and all she could do was to let it get on with whatever was happening to it.
The pain reached a crescendo she didn’t know how she was going to survive; she felt as if she were being split in two; as if she were enduring death by medieval torture.
There was a gush of warm liquid, a lusty yelling, and it was over. She gave fervent thanks to God and turned her attention to the mucus-covered, squalling infant on the bed.
He was beautiful. Just as nothing had prepared her for the rigours of labour, so she was totally unprepared for the overwhelming love she instantly felt for the kicking scrap of humanity that was her son. In one swift second she forgot her vows never again to become pregnant. If this was the result then she wanted a baby every year. He was wonderful; incredible; magical beyond anything she had ever imagined.
It seemed an eternity before his umbilical cord was cut and he was bathed and powdered and dressed in a little tiestring vest, a frilled and beribboned nightdress and a muslin napkin. Finally, when she knew she would die if she had to wait a moment longer, he was wrapped in a shawl and placed in her arms.
His hair was still damp and plastered slickly to his head and it was impossible to tell its true colour. It was dark though, far darker than Julian’s Anglo-Saxon fairness. The colour of his eyes, too, was nearly impossible to distinguish. Diana had told her that all babies were born with blue eyes, but her son’s eyes didn’t look a true blue. They were grey, the colour of English bluebells before they opened. She wondered if he was going to look more English than Slav and, if he did, if she would mind.
He made a little mewling sound, his tiny fingers struggling to be free of the shawl. She loosened it gently, knowing the answer immediately. No matter how English his colouring might prove to be, it wouldn’t matter in the slightest. All that mattered was that he was hers and that he was healthy. She wondered how soon it would be before she could return to Belgrade with him. She wondered if it would matter having the christening when he was several months old.
‘What are you going to call him?’ Diana demanded when she was allowed in the bedroom to see them both.
‘Stephen.’
Diana’s carefully plucked eyebrows rose in startled surprise. ‘Stephen? Is that your father’s name?’
Natalie looked towards the crib, loath to take her eyes off its contents for even a second. ‘No. Papa’s name is Alexis and Stephen will be Stephen Alexis.’
‘You can’t just name him after your father,’ Diana said reasonably. ‘If you do, Pa will be most dreadfully hurt. And what abut Julian? Won’t he be expecting his son to be named after him?’
Natalie frowned slightly. She had never seriously discussed names with Julian. ‘Stephen Alexis Julian,’ she amended, wishing that Julian was a little more Slavic.
Diana decided to forgo the subject of her father’s name being included as well. New mothers were notoriously touchy and she didn’t want Natalie bursting into postnatal tears.
‘Why Stephen?’ she asked again. ‘Is it a Karageorgevich family name?’
Natalie shook her head. ‘No. George and Alexander are the most common Karageorgevich male names. I’m calling him Stephen after Stephen Dushan Nemanya who was crowned Tsar of all the Serbs in 1346 when Serbia was an empire.’
‘Very nice too,’ Diana said good-humouredly, grateful that the Tsar’s first Christian name hadn’t been as much of a tongue-twister as his other two names. Her mother was going to find it hard enough to come to terms with Stephen as a first name. Dushan would have pole-axed her.
‘The baby will be christened at St James’s when Julian is next on leave,’ her mother-in-law said frostily when the subject came under discussion and Natalie told her of her plans to have Stephen baptized in Belgrade Cathedral. ‘It could be years before it’s safe to travel to the Balkans and a young child most certainly couldn’t make such an arduous journey. It’s out of the question.’
Natalie thought of the luxury of the Orient Express and did what she always did when in conflict with Lady Fielding. She ignored her. It was the only way she could survive the situation. If she once gave rein to her volatile temper she doubted if her mother-in-law would live to tell the tale.
A month after Stephen’s birth she again met Nikita at the church hall. This time he greeted her like an old friend, vastly relieved that the bulk that had been the baby had now disappeared.
‘We’re not staying here, among these old women,’ he said, his disparaging glance taking in the men as well as their wives and daughters. ‘I have people I want you to meet.’
‘Good,’ Natalie said in happy anticipation. ‘Are they the friends you spoke about before? The ex-mayor of Split and the journalist and the sculptor?’
‘Maybe, though maybe not. They’re important people. They’re in meetings all the time with men such as the editor of the British Times and Mr Seton-Watson.’
Natalie had no idea who Mr Seton-Watson was but as he was obviously important, and as she knew from the attention her father-in-law gave to every announcement in The Times that its editor was important also, she was impressed.
The ex-mayor of Split and the journalist and the sculptor were not at the café to which Nikita took her, but there were lots of othe
r Slavs there, all young and all nationalistic.
Natalie was in heaven. It was just like being in the Golden Sturgeon again, only instead of talking endlessly over cups of coffee and small glasses of slivovitz, her new-found friends talked endlessly over cups of English tea.
Her relationship to King Peter gave her immediate status, just as it had done with Gavrilo and Trifko and Nedjelko. She was questioned endlessly as to what his policy was with regard to the creation of a new South Slav state and, even more importantly as Alexander was now Regent, what Alexander’s policy was.
As before, Natalie had no real idea. She and Alexander had gossiped, played tennis and romped with Bella together, they hadn’t discussed politics. As before she took great care that no-one should suspect her ignorance as to her cousin’s political views. As nearly all Nikita’s friends were Croats, not Serbs, the subject most under discussion was not union between Serb and Serbian, as it had been in the Golden Sturgeon. Instead the preoccupation was with exactly how equal partnership between Serb and Croat in a new South Slav state would actually be achieved. Such semantics left Natalie cold. All that mattered to her was that the new state would be, by another name, the glorious medieval empire ruled over by Tsar Stephen and that this time Alexander would be its Tsar.
There had been a few slight frowns when she had happily referred to this idyllic vision of the future.
‘We’re working for constitutional, democratic and parliamentary union, not for an enlarged Serbia,’ one of the older men said to her cautioningly.
Natalie had met with this hair-splitting before and had little patience with it. Union between the Slavic states, at present unwillingly part of the Habsburg empire, and Serbia, would obviously result in an enlarged Serbia and she had never been unable to understand why her non-Serbian friends could not see that.
Zadruga Page 27
