‘I’ll come,’ Anne said, having little difficulty in translating this as a cry for help. Bad weather lately had confined Lolya and Nasha to the house a great deal, making them even more boisterous and high-spirited than usual; and Fräulein Hoffnung had a head cold.
‘Run along to Nyanka, girls, and put on your outdoor things,’ Anne said as she lifted the siege. The Fräulein rolled grateful eyes in her direction, and drew out her third handkerchief of the day. ‘And you had much better go to bed,’ Anne added to the sufferer as the children ran away. ‘You don’t look at all the thing.’
As soon as they were outside, Lolya and Nasha rushed off like dogs frisking, and were soon snowballing each other and shrieking with all the force of their pent-up energy. Lolya, now almost thirteen, had reached the age when her normal propensity was to behave like a hoyden. She bubbled over all day long with energy, and her high spirits were sometimes violent, especially when bad weather confined her indoors for any length of time; but she was gradually learning the accomplishments of a woman and beginning to take an interest in her future marriage prospects; and had fits of worrying that she was little taller at thirteen than she had been at nine.
‘When will I grow, Anna Petrovna?’ she would ask anxiously. ‘How tall were you when you were my age? What if I never grow any more, ever?’
Anne’s attempts to reassure her were defeated by the fact that her cousin Kira was six inches taller than her, and even more so by the fact that Nasha had suddenly shot up and, at six and a half, could easily keep up with her. Anne had been glad to see the friendship growing between the sisters. Natasha was mature in advance of her years, and Lolya now found in her an acceptable companion for her games and a sympathetic listener to her troubles.
Nasha was a good listener. After the incident at the ice-fair, she had not spoken again for some time, but it was clear that it was from disinclination, not inability, and her reading and writing skills grew rapidly from that point. Anne took great pleasure in teaching her, because she was so eager to learn. Lolya only learned to please Anne, or because she thought it would be useful to her in later life; but Nasha had a real hunger for knowledge for its own sake. She still spoke little, rarely volunteering a remark, and answering more often than not with gestures and nods of the head; but she wrote reams, stories and poems and strange internal monologues, and made pencil sketches and tiny coloured paintings which she showed to Anne with the confidence of love.
Anne received them with pleasure and a certain tingling of unease. Both the writing and the drawing presented a view of the world which was strangely familiar, and yet which gave the impression of being slightly distorted in a way Anne could not quite pin down. It was as if she were looking through one of the crystals of the lustre in the great halclass="underline" everything appeared tiny and radiantly clear, rainbow edged, and infinitesimally out of shape.
As well as her silence, Nasha had retained her self-absorption. Left alone, she would amuse herself quite happily all day long, writing or drawing, or simply staring into the fire or out of the window for hours at a time, her golden eyes blank and shining, her face serene as she travelled through some landscape of thought which was entirely satisfying to her. While Lolya had the normal child’s love of novelty, playing with a thing briefly and discarding it when her attention was diverted, Nasha had an intensity of focus which could shut out interruptions, land she would carry one thing around with her all day, to feel it and look at it until she knew it absolutely.
But with all that, there were enough times when, as now, she rushed about, shrieking and romping with Lolya, for Anne to feel there was no need to worry about her. Nasha had unusual talents, but she was a normal, healthy child as well. Anne was not entirely sure that it was always Lolya who initiated their naughty pranks, though it was usually she who took the blame. Yesterday, for instance, when they had tried to make an indoor skating rink in one of the unused rooms of the palace, by opening the top windows and pouring water on the floor. There had been something about Nasha’s face that had made Anne suspect it was she who first thought of it; but Lolya was the one who had argued, justified, defended, and finally sighed and accepted punishment.
They needed a firm hand, Anne thought with a sigh, and though they minded her pretty well, there were times when she wished there was a higher authority to whom to appeal. But the Count was away, and the Countess, though physically present, was growing more absent, it seemed, every day.
Walking along the quay behind the children, Anne thought about her with a mixture of anxiety, pain, and exasperation. Irina had never been the same since Sashka was born. In fact, she had begun to change even during that pregnancy. Anne remembered how for the first few happy days, she had basked in the joy of accomplished love. The Count had treated her like something fragile and precious, and Anne had been driven nearly mad with fiercely suppressed jealousy. But then Vera Borisovna had returned to the palace from her visit and had been told the news that the hated interloper was pregnant again. Anne had watched the Dowager’s lips whiten with fury, and for a moment had thought that she would actually forget herself and let out all her rage and spite.
But the moment passed. Vera Borisovna controlled herself, and uttered a few words of congratulation, though in such a cold and loathing voice that even the Count could not have believed she meant them. Irina seemed to shrink together under the icy glare like something blighted by frost, and the joy went out of the pregnancy. From then on it brought her only misery. Physically she was unwell, troubled with continuous nausea, cramps, headaches, insomnia, and later backache and painfully swollen legs. Yet those were the least of her problems: it was the Dowager’s persecution which really made the pregnancy a torment. Vera Borisovna was furious that another half-caste was to be brought into the world to steal her precious grandchildren’s inheritance from them, and in every way she could, she vented her spite on Irina.
It was a subtle and unrelenting campaign. The Dowager could not attack openly, or do anything that might provoke her son to remonstrate; but she was a master in the art of the veiled insult, the criticism disguised as kindly advice, the reminiscence designed to undermine confidence. The Count, seeing his wife grow pale and thin, expressed his concern about her, giving his mother a new opening; for now, under the guise of concern for Irina’s health, the Dowager could describe in lingering detail all the miscarriages, birth agonies and childbed deaths she had ever witnessed or heard about .
There came a day when Irina, while talking to Nyanka about the state of the linen cupboard, collapsed in tears on that broad, familiar breast and sobbed out her fears that the Dowager was ill-wishing her, that she would give birth to a deformed child or die in childbed. Nyanka, fierce in her motherliness like a mountain bear, offered to go at once and turn the Dowager bodily out of the house. But Irina, her sobs subsiding, begged her to say and do nothing, afraid that any intervention would only make things worse. Nyanka insisted on giving her the phial of St Nino’s blood to wear around her neck as protection against the Evil Eye and stamped about the house muttering imprecations, crossing herself whenever she passed the Dowager. At the end of the day, when the Count returned home, Nyanka cornered him and told him bluntly that if the Dowager did not leave, she could not answer for the consequences.
‘My mistress’s nerves are all to pieces,’ Nyanka said, fixing him with a steely eye, ‘and if you want your son to be born alive, you must do something about it.’