When the room was cleared, Anne walked over to the window and picked up the shoe, noting as she did that it felt unexpectedly cold, though the soft leather soon warmed in her hand. Imagination, perhaps? She went back to the bed, and stood quietly. After a while Irina opened her eyes again, and Zina said, ‘Take a sip of wine. You’ll feel better soon.’
Marie helped her prop up Irina’s head while Zina held a wineglass to her lips. When she was resting against the pillows again, Irina said, ‘I saw her. I saw Nasha.’ Her voice was weak, but clear.
‘Of course you did,’ Zina said soothingly. ‘What else would you expect, the way you’ve been carrying on? I’ve seen this coming these two days. You must eat properly, Irushka, or you’ll make yourself ill.’
Irina caught her sister’s wrist, and her knuckles showed white. ‘Don’t baby me! You know what I’m saying! You know my visions are true ones! I saw her – I saw my child. She’s alive!’
Zina did not deny it, but she could not help a tiny shake of her head in disbelief. Irina’s eyes came round pleadingly to Anne’s.
‘She’s alive. I saw the place.’ She frowned with concentration. ‘A high place. Very high. And very cold.’
‘Do you know where it is?’ Anne asked tentatively.
Irina stared through her. ‘A long way away. Further away than we’ve been searching. A high place…’
‘In the mountains?’ Anne asked.
‘Yes! High in the mountains!’ She closed her eyes, plainly exhausted.
‘Leave her alone, now,’ Zina interposed quietly. ‘Don’t excite her again – she needs to sleep. You’d better go back to bed – Marie and I can cope. Goodnight, Anna Petrovna.’
Anne was dismissed too firmly to resist, and with a final, doubtful glance at the Countess, she went away. She looked in to see that Sashka had settled, and found him half asleep, with Nyanka sitting beside his bed. The old woman nodded to her, and Sashka turned his face drowsily for Anne’s kiss.
‘Is Mama all right now?’
‘Yes, she’s all right. She’s sleeping now – and so must you. Goodnight, Sashka.’
‘Goodnight, Anna,’ he murmured. He was almost asleep. ‘I’m glad Nasha’s all right.’
Anne went quietly away, leaving him to Nyanka. In her own room, she went to the window to pull the curtains closed, and found Nasha’s shoe still in her hand. It was so small, and so soft. She remembered the strange voice that had come from Irina’s mouth, remembered the bleak, pitiful words, and suddenly she was crying – for the first time since Nasha had been lost. Whatever had been the truth of Irina’s ‘vision’, it brought home to her the stark reality: wherever Natasha was, she was alone, facing either life or death without anyone to help or comfort her, and she was only seven years old.
Anne lay on her bed and cradled her head in her arms and wept; and weeping, she finally fell asleep.
It was a very different Irina who faced her brothers the next morning. Her face was pale, beginning to be a little gaunt, smudged here and there with violet shadow, and yet alert and alive, taut with eagerness, her eyes like gold flame as she told of her vision.
‘You must search further afield. She’s not nearby – not on Chastnaya at all. But she’s alive.’
‘Can’t you tell us where, Rushka?’ Feodor asked. He looked grey with fatigue; if he believed that his sister’s vision was true, he hadn’t enough energy to spare to show it.
‘A high place,’ she said. ‘Cold and high.’
‘But where? Which direction?’ Dmitri asked. ‘North, south, east or west?’
‘If it’s a high place, it can’t be north or east,’ Danil pointed out. ‘The mountains are south and west.’
‘Depends how high. It needn’t be as high as a mountain.’
‘Cold means high, doesn’t it? Was there snow, Rushka? Did you see snow?’
‘Maybe it’s Mount Kazbek. Could you see that?’
Sergei had been listening to this with scant patience. Now he said, ‘For God’s sake, how could a little child get up Mount Kazbek? Or get as far as that, for that matter? It must be more than a hundred versts.’
Irina turned on him. ‘You don’t believe me? You don’t believe I saw her?’
‘It doesn’t matter whether I believe it or not, Mama,’ Sergei said impatiently, ‘unless you can describe the place in more detail. High and cold doesn’t help us much, does it? It could be anywhere.’
‘One thing we know,’ Danil said, frowning at Sergei, ‘is that it is somewhere. You don’t understand – they run in the family, these visions, and they never lie.’
Sergei made a dismissing movement with his hand. ‘All 1 said was a child of that age couldn’t have got that far on her own.’
They looked at each other with hostility; and Anne, feeling sympathy on both sides, said, ‘How far is it to the nearest mountains? High ones, I mean?’
‘Fifty versts, perhaps, going south-west,’ Feodor said.
Sergei looked at him sharply. ‘That’s Chechen country,’ he said.
‘Those tribesmen you saw – could they have been Chechen?’ Feodor asked cautiously.
Sergei shrugged. ‘They were against the light, and a long way off. They could have been anything.’ He looked uncomfortable, not wanting to say what he had to say next. ‘But – look, if the Chechen took her, it’s highly unlikely – well, that she’d still be in the mountains, and alive. Either they’d have killed her, or sold her south.’ He flickered a glance at Irina. ‘I’m sorry, Mama, but it’s true.’
She rounded on him like a tigress. ‘I saw what I saw! You Moscow-bred, you city-bred nothing – what do you know about it? You only believe what you can see and touch. But my brothers believe me! They know! I saw her – she’s alive!’
‘Please, Mama–’ Sergei began to protest; and Irina actually lifted both hands, clenched into fists, and brought them down violently against his breast.
‘Find her!’ she cried fiercely. ‘Find your sister! Find my child!’
They pored over maps, they pondered, they discussed. None of the enquiries they had pursued outside the estate had produced any result, though they had hardly expected them to, even though they had offered a reward for information: the loyalty of the Tcherkess to each other was usually stronger than their sympathy for their Russian overlords, even when the latter were bolstered with money.
Anne looked from face to face, trying to guess what they were thinking. Dmitri and Danil believed wholeheartedly in Irina’s vision; Sergei was openly sceptical, though he said no more about it. Between the extremes, Mishka and Grishka probably believed it with their stomachs, but rejected it with their minds, knowing that the chances of finding Nasha alive had diminished with every passing day, of which there had already been too many.
As to Feodor, it was impossible to judge what he believed: he knew what his duty was and did it, without comment or explanation; he was the patriarch, and responsible for the estate and everyone on it; but he loved his younger brothers and sisters with a warm-blooded Russian fervour, and not for anything would he have hurt Irina, or tried to destroy a faith which she evidently found sustaining.
It was while she was looking at his long, grey face that Anne had her idea. Her mind had been drifting a little; and suddenly, far away in the back of her thoughts, she heard the Tartar Prince saying Akim Shan Kalmuck knows everything; it is his business to know everything. She thought of him, of his dark, bright, feral eyes, his calculating looks, his seemingly genuine admiration for her. If anyone could obtain information from the tribes, surely it must be him? She wondered she hadn’t thought of it before.