Anne had no idea what she was going to say until she heard her own voice. ‘Unfortunately, sir, because of the urgency of our quest, I did not bring a waiting woman with me. It would not be proper for me to remain under your roof, unattended by any female.’
She saw Dmitri staring at her as though she had run mad. She rather thought she had run mad; but the Prince seemed delighted with the inconsequence of her answer, enchanted by its incongruity.
‘It is no matter,’ he said, and the gentleness was real now. ‘I shall appoint a woman of my own people to wait on you. You are my honoured guest. No harm shall come to you.’
Anne could only bow her consent, momentarily exhausted by the tension of the last few minutes.
The Prince gave a rapid string of orders to the waiting servants, who scattered to obey them with a speed which spoke of either great devotion or great fear.
‘And now, you shall come and see the tiger,’ he said, rising gracefully to his feet, and holding out a hand to raise Anne. When she was on her feet, he bent over her conspiratorially, and she smelt the feral sweetness of his breath. ‘The interesting thing about the tiger is that if you fear it, it will tear out your throat; but if you do not fear, it will not harm you.’ He smiled beguilingly. ‘But of course you must be genuinely without fear. The tiger will always know the difference.’
‘Always, sir?’ Anne said faintly.
‘Always. But you may comfort yourself with the thought that if it does kill you, it is a swift and noble death.’ Anne walked with him, beyond fear, beyond even surprise now. ‘The tiger’s death, and not the jackal’s,’ the Prince said reflectively, leading her to the door. ‘Perhaps, at last, that is the best any of us can wish for.’
Chapter Eighteen
Anne drifted upwards towards wakefulness, her thoughts hazy and confused. Where was she? Something had happened. Had she been ill? Half asleep, she thought she was in the sick-room at Miss Oliver’s school. She had been there once, when she had influenza: a small room under the roof, with a hard and narrow bed, and a skylight through which you could see the clouds passing, and the shadows of birds. It had a dusty, unused smell, the smell of dry attics everywhere.
She drifted away again. The influenza had left her tired, weak and confused. She was too hot. The blanket was rough, and prickled her skin wherever it touched. Later the doctor would come and give her a draught, dark and foul-tasting, like thin tar. She didn’t want to take it. He hung over her, menacing, his aquiline nose coming closer to her face… and closer… his teeth were white and sharp, his eyes yellow, a beast’s eyes with slit pupils…
She woke with a start, opening her eyes to stare at the beams of the vaulted wooden ceiling in utter confusion, not knowing where she was, who she was, what had happened. For a moment she panicked, straining her head up from the pillow, staring at the wooden walls around her, her mind empty of the usual comfortable certainties of time and space, trying to make sense of what she saw.
Then knowledge seeped slowly back. She remembered. She was in the Prince’s house, in the mountains, in the Caucasus, in Russia. Last night there had been a feast and dancing, and she had gone late to bed – to this unexpectedly hard bed with the coarse, striped blanket which had rubbed a sore place on her neck.
She lay looking at the roof and reflecting. It was utterly fantastic, of course. Five years ago – only five – she had been a governess in a house in Margaret Street; she had never been outside England; she had never even seen the sea. Her life had been ordered and monotonous, safe, filled with the familiar and trivial, with small vexations and small pleasures. A new book from the circulating library in Wigmore Street had been something to look forward to; mending stockings had been a chore to be put off.
She thought of last night, of the banquet in the smoky, dark halclass="underline" the air had been hard to breathe, with a mixture of incense and torch smoke, and the reek of charred meat and the Prince’s civet-sweet perfume, and another pungent, almost herbal smell from the aromatic leaf which the Prince and his male guests smoked, which was not tobacco, and which, even breathed in second-hand, made Anne feel dizzy.
She thought of the strange things she had eaten and drunk. Most of the time she had no idea what she was putting into her mouth, and perhaps it was just as well. A seemingly endless procession of dishes had come from the kitchens, each borne by a servant to the Prince, who sniffed, tasted, and then with his own hands served a small amount into a bowl which he gave to Anne.
Many were spicy, all strange, some unpleasant. Sometimes she asked what it was, and sometimes she was told. A charred, strong meat was wild boar, the spiky flavouring of it rosemary; thin, flexible strips with little taste at all was octopus; small joints full of bones were some kind of rabbit. At one point there was a chunk of lamb, moist and delicious, flavoured with coriander leaves. A soup with a grainy texture was presumably made with lentils; a dark stew might have been anything, and Anne did not recognise the name of the spice the Prince mentioned. There were some things that might have been oysters but weren’t, and which she tried to swallow without thinking, because she was told they were a great speciality, and always given to the honoured guest. There were sweet things, too – cakes running with thin honey, sweet curds with nuts, sticky white gritty balls a little like marzipan – too many sweet things. Then more meats, and fish, and fowl. And more sweets. The feast went on until Anne had exhausted all capacity for surprise, and any desire ever to eat again.
While they ate there was entertainment, music and dancing. Some of the music was pleasant and familiar, the sort of thing she had grown used to since coming to Russia: country music, sweet and plaintive, or fast and jolly. But some seemed monotonous and hard to listen to, played on strange instruments with a penetrating, jangling sound which got into her head and hurt. The dancing was easy to watch, but made her feel dizzy, though that might have been something to do with the smoke in the air, and the quantities of wine she had been obliged to drink. Though she was tormented with thirst, it was beyond her even to contemplate lemonade or water in such fantastic surroundings. At the end of the feast, great bowls of fruit were brought in, and Anne fell on them with the first eagerness she had felt for hours, and quenched her thirst on figs and kumquats.
And even then they were not done. The servants brought in a small brazier, a brass pot with a long neck, and some other equipment, and proceeded to make coffee, which was served to the guests in cups so small and so fragile they were like the blown shells of robin’s eggs. With the coffee they were served spirits – kumiss, made from fermented mare’s milk, and kummel, flavoured with carraway seeds, and a variety of thick, sticky liquors made from fruit – and more sweetmeats. And there was more entertainment – music of the eastern sort, and singing, tuneless to western ears and wearisome.
Anne picked through her confused, whirling, multicoloured memories. Running through them all, the constant thread, was the Prince, the smell and sound of him, his presence, impossible to ignore, his character, impossible to understand. They talked all evening, and Anne felt exhausted at the very memory of it. It was like conversing with a lunatic: no ease, no surety, no knowing from moment to moment what he would say or how he could react, which words would spell life and which death. His Russian was difficult and idiosyncratic, and sometimes he used dialect words she didn’t know, and there was no one nearby to translate for her, or advise her.
The Prince; and the tiger. If the Prince was the thread running through the cloth, then the tiger was the jewel in the centre. Sifting back through the day, before the feast, she came to the moment when he had led her away after that first interview to see the tiger. She hadn’t really believed in it, and her scepticism lasted right up until the moment she first saw it. The Prince took her to a small room at one end of the house, bare of decoration, with one small window high up, through which the only light came. It was empty except for the cage containing the tiger.