Anna

Chapter One

It was a fine spring day in 1803. The sky was a vivid, impermanent blue, and the light – the long sunlight of April – was clear and strong and without heat. Paris had been awake since before sunrise, when the carts from the countryside began to come in, bringing milk and vegetables and meat for the markets; their iron-hooped wheels had battered the milky silence out of the dawn streets, and shaken the birds awake. Now the day was broad, and the city lay, gold-grey and blue-slated in her green frame of fields and woods, humming like a giant bee skep with the intensity of her daily life.

Miss Anne Peters, governess, picked her way along the busy streets with her senses stretched to the delight of being in this strange, and strangely familiar, place. She had been in Paris since the previous November, but the dual quality of strangeness and familiarity had been with her from the very first: she had always felt as though she had known Paris from some other life.

In London, her employers lived in Margaret Street on the corner of the fashionable Cavendish Square, an area of broad, handsome thoroughfares and splendid new houses with the geometrical symmetry made possible by modern skills. From the window of her room at the top of the house, Anne had looked out on the scene with the sense that here was the very essence of the eighteenth century: clean, orderly, thriving – nature controlled by man.

But here in Paris, the streets were narrow, and the crooked mediaeval houses reared up shoulder-to-shoulder to cut out the sunlight, hanging perilously over the cobbles as though they might tumble down at any moment. Her employers’ present residence, at number eight rue St Augustine, had no single wall or floor that was straight, and the treads of the staircase sloped alarmingly from the wall towards the stairwell, as if in only temporary alliance with the laws of engineering. Anne’s room here overlooked a tumble of roofs and gables and gutters, where slate-blue pigeons cooed and strutted in the sunlight. Anne had been fascinated to see a woman opposite open the window and put the cat out onto the roof to take its daily exercise – much to the pigeons’ consternation. Below roof-level, the houses plunged into shadow, and a maze of cold, mossy little yards.

Paris teemed and thrived without regard to symmetry. And yet, different though it was in every particular, it appealed to something in Anne that longed for wild places. Though her appearance was plain and neat, as she picked her way across the cobbles of the market on the Île de la Cité her head was up, her cheeks a little coloured by the brisk breeze running off the river.

Of course, not all of Paris was shabby. The destructive turmoil of the Revolution and the stagnation of the corrupt Directory had given way to comparative stability, and there were signs of regeneration. Everywhere, new work was going on: new houses, renovations, and the first public undertakings for more than a decade. The able general, Bonaparte, had turned politician. He had made himself First Consul of the three-man Consulate, and now lived and ruled almost like a king in the splendour of Catherine de’ Medici’s Palace of the Tuileries.

England had made peace with the infant nation. It was an artificial peace, existing not because the two sides had reconciled their differences, but because ten years of war had led to a stalemate. The genius of the Corsican general, and the size of the armies he was able to raise, had made France invincible by land; the might of the King’s Navy had made England invincible by sea. Internal English politics, and Bonaparte’s need for a breathing-space, had led to the treaty of Amiens a year ago. And suddenly a generation who had never set foot outside their native land saw the opportunity for foreign travel. English people flocked in holiday mood to Paris.

The Murrays had come over in November, when England and France exchanged embassies. Sir Ralph Murray was on the staff of the English Ambassador, Lord Whitworth, and Lady Murray would not for worlds have missed the opportunity of advancing herself and her daughters in society. Lady Murray had only been a Miss Curtis, daughter of a successful coal merchant, with nothing but a pretty face and seven thousand pounds to enable her to get on in the world. She had married very well considering who she was, and she wanted her daughters to do even better. She was shrewd enough to realise that Sir Ralph’s importance would be greater in the diplomatic community of Paris than it was in the wider circles of London society.

She also believed that her girls would stand out much better against a background of French women, whom she was convinced were all flat-chested and ugly. The only two Frenchwomen she knew were the elderly émigré who made her underwear, and the governess of the children of her intimate friend, Mrs Cowley Crawford, both of whom happened to be swarthy and plain, so she clung to the idea with the determination of ignorance. Lady Murray had received the fashionable female education of thirty years ago, which meant that she could embroider exquisitely, draw prettily, dance gracefully, and sing three songs in Italian; but if she had ever been able to read and write, she had given it up entirely when she first began to put up her hair.

Anne Peters had been with the Murrays for three years, and at first she had been puzzled as to why a woman who had no use for education had chosen her to take charge of her daughters. Anne’s education was extensive. Her father had been a sea-officer, and since Anne was born during one of England’s brief periods of peace, he had been at home on half-pay with nothing to do while she was growing up. Her mother had died when she was very small, and her father had not remarried. Anne and her father had enjoyed an unusual closeness, and he had occupied his mental energies by educating her.

He had found her an apt pupil, with a hunger for knowledge which reflected his own. He taught her mathematics and geography and astronomy, the academic subjects of his trade; and Latin and Greek and philosophy, the mental furniture of the gentleman. She had inherited his musical ear, and learned French, Italian, and German from him as easily as singing, dancing, and playing the pianoforte. As his close daily companion, she learned to ride a horse and row a boat, to fish and to shoot, and to discuss politics; what she did not learn were the feminine arts.

The revolutionary war began in 1792, when Anne was twelve. Her father received an active commission in the navy, and her world, which she had viewed as permanent and immutable, was shattered. The house in which she was born and raised was given up, and Anne was taken in a hired carriage to Miss Oliver’s School in Sydney Place, Bath, where her father kissed her, enjoined her to work hard and be a good girl, and left her.

Anne found herself bewildered by the loss of his presence, and for weeks could not settle to her new life, but waited, uncomprehending, like an abandoned animal watching a closed door, for him to come back for her. After a time, the pain of missing him turned into lethargy. She took no interest in anything, and slept a great deal, slipping away at all times of day, to be found curled up in some obscure corner asleep.

When at last she began to climb out of the darkness, she found Miss Oliver waiting for her. Her father had chosen wisely. Miss Oliver was herself an educated woman, intelligent, novel, and vigorous: the very person to understand Anne’s feelings, and to stimulate her enquiring mind. Miss Oliver continued to educate her new charge along the lines Captain Peters had established, but made sure that the other gaps were filled too. The thin, twig-like twelve-year-old with the burning eyes and the overgrown mind began to fill out into a rounded person.

Anne liked Miss Oliver, and once she had adjusted, she liked Bath, too. There was always something doing, something new to think about, someone new to meet. She enjoyed the company of other girls of her own age, though she could never achieve any great intimacy with them. She was so in advance of them intellectually that they were a little reserved with her. And she never managed to get over the feeling that her residence in Bath was temporary, that at any moment Papa would come back for her. For the next five years she lived from letter to letter, waiting for the sound of wheels on the cobbles, the knock at the street door, which would herald the return to real life. Even now, in the moment of confusion between sleeping and waking, she would sometimes wonder if today would be the day. Then she would wake fully and remember, and the pain was fresh and bitter every time.

In 1797, Captain Peters had attained flag rank, and had been despatched up the Baltic on a diplomatic mission. He had never sailed in Northern waters before, and sent Anne excited letters describing the marvels of this new territory, the scenery and his trips ashore, the things he had seen, and the people he had met. He spoke of coming ashore again when this mission was over. Since the war began, in common with many other sailors, he had not set foot on English soil; he had not seen his daughter since he left her at the school. But when he had made his report to Their Lordships, he would surely be granted some period of leave, and then he would come straight to Bath.

He also enclosed a pair of pearl earrings for her seventeenth birthday.

My girl is growing up now, he wrote. Soon some other man will take my place in her heart. Well, that’s as it should be; and though I don’t suppose I’ll think him good enough for you, my Anne, I know enough of your good sense to be sure that you will not part with your precious self to anyone unworthy. So turn up your hair, my darling, and put these in your pretty ears, and enjoy the things that belong to youth; and think sometimes of one who never ceases to think of you, with blessings.

Anne put her hair up and wore the earrings at dinner on her birthday. Miss Oliver, who was very fond of Anne, ordered a special dinner, and allowed her and the other senior girls to taste wine for the first time. They drank a toast to her while she sat blushing under the unaccustomed attention, her brown eyes bright, her cheeks pink. There was no gentleman there to notice it. Anne knew no young men: for all her intellectual maturity, she was as innocent as a rose; and, on that day at least, as lovely.

It was on the following day that the letter arrived to say that her father had died of typhus at Riga six weeks before. Contrary winds had delayed his last letter to her; and it seemed somehow a bitter thing that he had already been dead a month, even as she read his happy words to her and unwrapped his birthday gift.

The mind does not retain a clear recollection of great anguish, only that it occurred. It was as well, Anne thought, or how should we ever survive? She remembered little of the darkness that overwhelmed her, or of the fear and loneliness that followed when, night after night, she would wake to the knowledge that she was alone in the world, that there was no single soul who bore any responsibility for her, who owed her any affection, care or protection. For the rest of her life, only her own labours, or cold charity, would keep her from starvation. It was too aweful a thought for a seventeen-year-old.

Miss Oliver, good friend that she was, kept Anne on at the school for a time, earning her keep by instructing the younger pupils, then helped her to find a position as a governess to a private family. Anne was without family or fortune, and it was the only profession open to her. She took up her position with the Murrays in April 1800, to teach Miss Murray and Miss Caroline, who were then fourteen and twelve years old.

Lady Murray was a very silly, ignorant woman, but there was nothing ill-natured about her, and her placid good humour was only ruffled if she were obliged to do something she didn’t like, or if her daughters were not sufficiently admired, or if her son Hartley’s extravagances were forced on her notice. Then she would grow vexed and fancy herself ill, and the house would be thrown into a turmoil. But she hadn’t the force of intellect to be really bad-tempered, and Anne discovered that if caught in time she was easily distracted into a better frame of mind.

The Miss Murrays, though inclined to be uppish, contrary, idle, and conceited, like most girls of their station and upbringing, were good-hearted enough underneath it all, and Anne soon learned the knack of coaxing and jollying them into doing what she wanted. Accomplishments fit for the drawing-room were all that was required for them, but for her own pride she extended the frontiers a little, and the Miss Murrays were tricked into learning quite a number of things more than their friends and contemporaries.

Life in the schoolroom jogged along comfortably for most of the time. There was no conflict of authority: any attempt by the girls to enlist their mother’s support against their governess met with a dismissive wave of the hand. ‘For heaven’s sake, Maria, your father pays Miss Peters a handsome salary to know best about these things.’ The Miss Murrays were as fond of their governess as it was in them to be, and occasionally they even allowed themselves to enjoy her company, when there was no entertainment to compete with it.

Anne had little to do with the male division of the family. Sir Ralph never noticed lesser beings unless they annoyed him; and though Mr Hartley had liked playing practical jokes on her when she first arrived – putting a frog into her bed or a handful of gentles into her reticule – he soon tired of it and turned to other sports, after which he acknowledged her only by a nod of the head if they happened to pass on the stairs.

So she settled in at Margaret Street. Her room was comfortable, the servants treated her politely, and she ate with the family unless they had guests. She even found something to admire in Lady Murray. As the daughter of a self-made man, her ladyship hated to see money wasted, which was the principal cause of her dissatisfaction with her son, who liked doing nothing better. She ran her household efficiently, and though she liked show, she was rarely misled by the tawdry, having and instinctive understanding of value for money.

Her manner towards Anne, though offhand, was never insolent. Indeed, she boasted to her acquaintance of Miss Peters’s intelligence and good family.

‘Indeed,’ Lady Murray would say, nodding over the tea-things, ‘if only the poor thing had any money, or was a little more handsome, she might have made quite a good match, for her mama, you know, was a Miss Strickland, and related to the Talbots of Northallerton.’

Lady Murray soon began to call on her for all sorts of extra services. Anne gradually took on the duties of secretary, sorting and reading her correspondence, accepting and refusing invitations, and replying to letters at Lady Murray’s dictation. Lady Murray liked novels, so when there was no company in the evening, Anne was required to sit by her mistress and read to her, or, when even the effort of listening was too great, to play cards. Lady Murray discovered that Miss Peters’s needlework was superior, and began to give her those delicate little tasks like repairing the hem of the lace ball gown, embroidering a silk bed gown, or trimming Lady Murray’s chemises.

Anne accepted it all with a good grace, for though she had a great deal of pride, she also craved human warmth. She had no home, no family, no human beings on whom to centre her life, apart from her employers. So whether ordering the dinner or arranging the flowers, preventing Miss Murray from buying the violently purple silk shawl she saw at the Pantheon Bazaar, or obliging Miss Caroline to practise her piece rather than sit staring out of a window, she entered wholeheartedly into the life of Margaret Street, and tried to become indispensible..

Anne reached the open space in front of the cathedral of Notre-Dame, and paused to gaze up at the delicate tracery of the great rose window, set for contrast between the stern Roman arches of the twin towers. Her father had had the mathematician’s love of architecture and had taught her how to look at buildings. Like so much in Paris, Notre-Dame seemed familiar, and yet subtly alien, and she wished passionately for a moment that Papa were here so that she could discuss it with him. But to be here at all, in a foreign country, was a source of delight to her.

The first conversation which took place between Sir Ralph and Lady Murray on the subject had occurred just after breakfast one day when her pupils were upstairs being measured for new pattern gowns, and Anne was writing letters to Lady Murray’s dictation. Lady Murray broke off suddenly to address her husband, who was still sitting amongst the bones and shells, reading the newspapers.

‘I have been thinking, Sir Ralph, that we had better all go to Paris with you. Mrs Cowley Crawford says Lady Whitworth is to go. She was formerly the Duchess of Dorset, you know,’ she added for Anne’s benefit. ‘She is a charming woman. She has twenty thousand a year of her own, but I hear she is immensely affable.’

‘Thirteen thousand,’ Sir Ralph corrected her without looking up, ‘and she is very proud.’

Lady Murray was unperturbed. ‘Anyone has the right to be proud, with thirteen thousand a year,’ she said easily, ‘but I dare say she is very charming after all. And situated as we shall be in Paris, there will be no avoiding the intimacy. What a wonderful thing it will be for our girls! We shall meet everyone. Maria will make a great match – a French duke or count with a large estate and several castles.’

‘French dukes and counts do not have large estates, since the Revolution,’ Sir Ralph replied, turning a page.

‘Someone must have them. They can’t belong to no one,’ Lady Murray concluded reasonably.

Sir Ralph, who had stopped listening, turned another page in silence, and Lady Murray paused a moment before taking a new direction. ‘It will not hurt, Sir Ralph, to be taking Hartley away from his present companions.’

At this, her husband did look up. Hartley Murray had come down from an expensive three years at Cambridge only to torment his parents by taking up with the most heedless set of peep-o’-day boys he could find. ‘True, ma’am. Foreign travel and new experiences must do him good; and at least it will break the hold that villainous young Cadmus seems to have over him.’

‘Harry Cadmus is the great-grandnephew of the Duke of Bedford,’ Lady Murray demurred, shocked; but then she sighed, ‘though I must own he does seem very wild. Well, so it is settled, then, Sir Ralph, that we should all go. Miss Peters, you must pay special attention to the girls’ French lessons. It would give them a great advantage over other girls if they could address these French dukes and counts in their own language. Just a few polite phrases, of course,’ she added hastily. ‘I should not wish them to be turned into scholars.’

The arrangements for the journey were made by one of the secretaries at the Embassy, while another was sent ahead to find a suitable house to rent. The passports were written out, and their passages booked on the packet Maid of Rye, which was to leave from Dover on the third of November. Hartley Murray, who had been sulking furiously for weeks over being taken away from his unlawful pursuits, commented tartly that he hoped she wouldn’t turn out really to be made of rye, or they would all be drowned.

The party left in three separate vehicles: one for the luggage, one for the servants, and bringing up the rear, Lady Murray, her daughters and Anne travelling together in the family berlin. Sir Ralph, his private secretary and Hartley were to go down later by post.

The journey to Dover was slow, with frequent stops to allow Caroline, who was inclined to be carriage-sick, to get out and walk about. Anne was obliged, of course, to travel backwards. While she did not much mind it, for she felt it gave one a better view of the passing scenery, she did mind having to sit next to Miss Murray and to listen to her endless complaints that, as the eldest daughter, she ought to have the other forward seat. It annoyed Anne to have to say again and again, ‘But you know Caroline can’t take the backward seat, because it makes her sick.’

‘I don’t believe she really feels sick,’ Miss Murray muttered sulkily. ‘She only says it to get the better seat, because she knows it ought to be mine.’

The same unworthy thought had crossed Anne’s mind; but later when they were jolting heavily over the very bad section of road between Gillingham and Canterbury, a glance at Caroline’s green and sweating face had revised her opinion.

At last, after two weary days on the road, the berlin reached Dover. It was a grey, overcast day, with a chilly wind tearing raggedly at the clouds, and the grey stone houses and cobbled streets made everything seem colourless. As they wound their way down through the town, Caroline let down the window to lean out, and a breath of air penetrated the stuffiness of the carriage. It smelled of horses, like every town, but there was also a new scent: sharper, tangy, thrilling. Caroline, her head stuck out at a perilous angle, cried out, ‘Oh Miss Peters, look! Do look!’

At the foot of the steep hill they were descending, the world dropped away into a wide vista of grey, restlessly heaving water which stretched away into the distance until it joined mistily with the sky. Overhead, white birds wheeled slowly on braced, narrow wings, crying faintly, and stronger with every breath came the exhilarating smell – an unforgettable mixture of salt, weed and tar – which her father must have smelled every day of his professional life.

She met Caroline’s excited eyes in a moment of complete sympathy. ‘It’s the sea!’ she breathed.

She felt a tangled rush of feelings: happiness and regret, a longing to be near and never to go away again, and a strange, wistful sort of understanding of what her father must have felt. He had loved the sea more than he had loved her: she felt now that she had always known it. When the war began and he had been offered a commission, he had obeyed the call instantly, abandoning her and hastening back to his first love.

Chapter Two

In Paris, the Murrays had led a life of continual engagement. Though the haughtiness of the Whitworths was proof against all advances, the Murrays were invited everywhere, and when the ladies were not attending some ball, rout, supper party, picnic, play or opera performance, they were visiting shops and warehouses, and spending hours closeted with mantuamakers. Once the first shock of the Paris fashions had worn off – never in the history of civilisation had women worn less in public – the Miss Murrays were mad to copy it. French ladies went décolleté even in daytime, and the hairstyles – elaborations of Greek curls and Roman ringlets – made Miss Murray mourn deeply her decision last year to crop, and beg Miss Peters to find some way of making her hair grow more quickly.

Hartley Murray had hung about the house for a day or two, annoying his mother and mocking his sisters, and assuming an air of world-weary boredom in place of his former sulks. Then he had discovered that a set of abandoned young rogues, whose sole preoccupations were drink and deep play, haunted the gardens of the Palais Royale. He had hastened to make himself one of their company and was now entirely happy and hardly ever at home, which was more comfortable for everyone.

Anne had to chaperone the young ladies when they were not accompanied by their mother, and still had her extra duties of sewing, writing, fetching and carrying, but there were no lessons, so on most days she had leisure to go out and explore the city. The first thing she had done was to find her way to the river, and the walk to the Île de la Cité remained her favourite. To the side of Notre-Dame was a newly laid out garden, with a stretch of grass and a gravelled walk along the bank of the island, from which, over a low parapet, one could look across the southern arm of the Seine towards the Quai St Michel. Here, Anne liked to stand and stare at the river moving peacefully by, the strong, ever-changing pattern of its flow broken now and then by a piece of flotsam, a flotilla of ducks, or a passing boat.

She had discovered a circulating library, newly set up in the rue St Roch for the benefit of the English visitors, which contained books in both English and French. In an access of boldness she had enrolled herself, and since then had been reading steadily through Voltaire, Racine, Diderot, Fontenelle and even Rousseau. She had a book in her reticule at this moment – one of the volumes of Candide – intending to find a sheltered spot under the walls of the cathedral and sit and read for a little. But the sunlight on the river was so pleasant that she stopped to gaze at it, as it flowed past her busily, on the way to its appointment with the sea.

She tried to visualise the map of Europe and work out exactly where that would be. All rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full. Her mind idly threw up the quotation, and she spent a moment tracking it to its source, and decided hesitantly that it must be Ecclesiastes. Then she wondered whether a sailor would see the world the other way round from a landsman, and would think of the seas as being bounded by land, and the estuaries as little inlets into the coast, rather than outlets into the sea. The associations of the word ‘sailor’ inevitably produced a sigh.

At once a voice beside her said in French: ‘What a sigh! But I think the thoughts were not sad ones, though they were so deep.’

Anne started and looked round to find a gentleman standing beside her and looking down at her with interest. He was tall, perhaps about thirty-five, with a long, mobile face – not handsome, but pleasant and intelligent. He was wearing a very fine grey pelisse with black silk frogging and a deep collar of some black fur which looked very soft and expensive, such as she had seen no gentleman in Paris wear before. This and a certain strangeness to his accent made her think he was not French, though certainly not English.

He looked at her quizzically. ‘So, mademoiselle? You have been a long way away, I think. Rivers have the same effect on me. I gaze at them and think of them bearing me away to some other place – always to some other place,’ he added, laughing suddenly, ‘even when I like the one I am in!’

Anne was confused. It was a very odd thing for a young woman to be addressed so familiarly by a stranger; and yet there was no impertinence in his expression, nothing of impropriety in his voice or his manner. His clothes were expensive, his air distinguished, and he did look faintly familiar to her. Yet she was sure she had never met him: if she had, she could never have forgotten those eyes, large and shining and such an unusual gold-green in colour. They looked at her with interest, as if they really saw her, as no eyes had looked at her since she had left Miss Oliver’s school; and the long, flexible lips were curved in a curious, closed smile, as if they liked what they saw.

But what could he mean by speaking to her? Puzzled rather than affronted, she replied in French, ‘I beg your pardon, sir. I do not think we have been introduced.’

‘I have offended custom by addressing you,’ he nodded, ‘but I have been watching the expressions flit across your face this quarter-hour, and I feel now as though we are old friends. Pray excuse me, mademoiselle, and allow me to present myself, and then we may continue this delightful conversation with complete propriety.’ He swept off his hat, revealing straight, silky, light- brown hair. ‘Count Nikolai Sergeyevitch Kirov of the Russian Embassy, entirely at your service! I have had the pleasure of seeing you many times in the company of Lady Murray. The two Miss Murrays I have met – perhaps Lady Murray may be your aunt?’

Anne was dismayed. She must tell him what she was, and then she would see the withdrawal in his eyes. Most people looked at a governess in the same way they would look at a door. He might even be affronted and blame her for the civilities he had wasted on a menial. She lowered her gaze to her feet and, stammering a little in her embarrassment, said, ‘I’m sorry, but I’m afraid you are mistaken, sir. I am Miss Peters, the Miss Murrays’ governess.’

A movement caught her attention and made her look up. At the moment of introduction, of course, it was for the lady to offer her hand to the gentleman, and never vice versa; but there was a tiny gesture of intended reciprocation a gentleman sometimes made, to suggest that if the hand were offered he would be more than glad to take it. It was a movement so small it was almost non-existent, and yet to a lady it was quite unmistakable. Anne, brought up as a gentlewoman, responded before she knew it. Her slim, gloved hand came forward, and the Count placed his fingertips under hers, and bowed over it, his lips brushing the air most correctly a fraction of an inch above her glove.

‘Enchanted to make your acquaintance, mademoiselle,’ he said, and as he straightened, his eyes danced as though he and she were in a delightful conspiracy to mock the forms of polite society.

‘Et le votre, monsieur,’ Anne murmured automatically, thinking wildly that perhaps he did not know what a governess was.

But his next words dispelled the doubt. ‘The credit must go to you, then, mademoiselle, that the Miss Murrays speak French with such an attractive accent, for I see that you speak the language à merveille.’

Anne could not help smiling. ‘A pleasing fiction, monsieur!’ she said. ‘You have heard me speak only two sentences – far too little to judge by.’

‘If you will forgive me for so directly contradicting you,’ he said, ‘it is quite enough when coupled with a face so expressive as yours, mademoiselle.’ He frowned suddenly in thought, surveying the face with renewed interest and said, ‘Miss Peters! Forgive me, but are you by any chance related to Admiral Peters, Admiral James Peters of His Britannic Majesty’s navy?’

It was one astonishing thing too much. Anne passed into a state of euphoria where nothing could surprise her any longer. ‘I am his daughter, sir,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

‘I thought so!’ the Count exclaimed, evidently gratified. ‘You have such a look of him, now I think of it, that it is no wonder I felt I knew you! I had the pleasure of meeting your father in Rugen in ’97 when we were both visiting the Prussian Ambassador there. We drank schnapps together one memorable night! He is well I hope?’

‘He died, sir, at Riga that autumn,’ Anne said flatly, and then, feeling she had spoken too brusquely, added in a lighter voice a quotation from Candide which she supposed he would know. ‘Dans ce pays-ci il est bon de tuer de temps en temps un amiral, pour encourager les autres.’

The Count did not react, and she felt a little foolish. His expression was grave as he said, ‘I am very sorry, mademoiselle. In time of war one becomes reluctant to ask after old friends for just that reason. You have family, perhaps? Brothers and sisters?’

‘None, sir.’

He smiled faintly. ‘You are all the daughters of your father’s house, and all the brothers too,’ he said in English.

‘Twelfth Night. You know Shakespeare,’ she said, delighted.

He grinned. ‘But of course! And you, mademoiselle, know Voltaire! Did you think I did not notice?’

‘I have the book in my reticule here,’ she said, patting it absurdly. ‘I was intending to sit in the sun a little and read.’

‘And I have prevented you,’ he said with a bow of apology. ‘But I am sure it is not warm enough to sit, Miss Peters, so I have saved you perhaps from an inconvenient chill. It would be a dreadful thing to miss the grand ball at the Tuileries next week, would it not?’

The words had the effect of reminding Anne who she was, and of the impropriety of what she was doing. The euphoria dissipated on the instant. She must not stand in this public place talking to a gentleman. Inside her she might be a gentlewoman from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes, but the outside of her was a governess, and so the world would judge her. Disappointment, resentment, and a vicarious shame rose in her and almost brought tears to her eyes, making her speak rather stiffly. ‘You need have no apprehension on that score, sir. Governesses have nothing to do with balls. And now, if you will forgive me, I must be going.’

He looked down at her with concern. ‘Now I have vexed you! I am so sorry.’

‘No, sir, not at all,’ she said, turning her face away.

‘But I have. You were smiling, and now you are distressed. Please forgive me.’

‘Truly, there is nothing to forgive,’ Anne said. ‘My time is not my own to command. My young ladies will be returning from their drive, and I must be there to meet them. Really, I must go.’

‘Your hand, then, to show that you forgive,’ he said, holding out his.

Anne looked up and met the kind, faintly smiling eyes, and felt that here was a man who made anything possible, whom the conventions could not touch, who could conjure happiness out of the air. She had last felt that about her father, and the fact that the Count had known him confused her for a moment, so that as she placed her hand in his, she smiled up at him without reserve, as she would have smiled at her father. It was entirely the wrong sort of smile for a young woman to give to a gentleman of slight acquaintance, but it did not seem to trouble the Count in the least. He pressed her hand firmly and said, ‘Au revoir, Miss Peters. We shall meet again, I am sure.’

Then he bowed, replaced his hat, and strolled away, leaving Anne feeling confused, happy, unhappy, puzzled and exhilarated in more or less equal proportions.

The diplomatic atmosphere in Paris had been electric ever since the middle of March, when the First Consul, Bonaparte, had verbally attacked Lord Whitworth at one of the Sunday drawing-rooms, pouring out a tirade of accusations and abuse, to which Whitworth had responded by very stiffly walking out. Matters had mended socially since then to the extent that the balls and parties were able to continue, but even Lady Murray had become aware, from her husband’s preoccupied frown, that negotiations between England and France were in a delicate state.

Anne, privy to a great deal more information because of her ability to understand French, knew that the governments distrusted each other, and that each was convinced the other was secretly arming for a continuation of the war. There seemed to have been breaches of the treaty on both sides, but of course each was convinced its own breaches were justified, while the other side’s were treacherous.

She had not lived in the household of a diplomat for three years, however, without learning that this was a normal state of affairs between countries, and it caused her no particular apprehension. During the next week she had other more immediate things to think about, principal amongst which was her meeting with the Russian Count.

When she was alone and unoccupied, she went over and over the conversation they had had, analysing everything he had said to her, and interpreting it so many different ways that at last the words seemed to have no meaning at all. Why had he spoken to her at all? It was not until later that he had known her for the daughter of an old acquaintance, so that could not be the excuse. Why had he continued to talk to her when he knew she was a governess? Perhaps Russians behaved more informally than the English: that was a pleasant thought. Would she see him again? And if she did, would he greet her as an acquaintance, or be cool with her? And if they met in the presence of her employers, what would their reaction be? She could imagine that they would not be best pleased: they would think her forward.

Any further meeting with him would be fraught with difficulties; and yet she had enjoyed so much the brief human contact, not only with someone who regarded her as a real person rather than a labelled object, but also with someone of wit and intelligence, that she could not help a wistfulness colouring the thought that she would probably never speak to him again.

Meanwhile, there was the grand Embassies Ball to prepare for. It was to be a splendid affair with two suppers and fireworks to follow, and the Murray ladies were reserving their best sartorial efforts for it. The Parisian mantuamaker they had been patronising had made the new gowns in plenty of time, but since they had been delivered, Anne and Simpkins had been called so often to make minute alterations and improvements that it was doubtful whether Madame Beauclerc would have recognised her creations.

Lady Murray’s gown had caused particular problems, for her ladyship had been enjoying French cooking with a certain abandon ever since November, and her pattern gown had grown too tight. Simpkins had tentatively suggested making up a new one, and had almost had her ears boxed for presumption, so the new purple satin had been made up to the old dimensions. When it came home, Simpkins had retired upstairs with her mistress and an apprehensive expression. About half an hour later, a servant had come to Anne saying she was wanted in my lady’s bedchamber.

Anne entered to find Simpkins, her face red and her cap over one eye, wrestling with portions of Lady Murray’s white dimpled flesh which were refusing to enter the confinement of the shining purple bodice.

‘You sent for me, ma’am?’ Anne said blandly, biting the insides of her cheeks.

Simpkins rolled a desperate and pleading eye towards her, while keeping a firm grip on the two edges of material she was attempting to bring together.

‘Ah yes, Miss Peters,’ said Lady Murray evenly, as though the struggle going on behind her were nothing to do with her. Her face rose perfectly calm above her tightly encased body like a naked woman half-swallowed by a purple whale. ‘Perhaps you could help Simpkins. She is being very stupid and clumsy, I fear.’

Simpkins, unable to restrain a growl, gestured to Anne with a jerk of the head to take hold of the dress while she used both hands to cram the unruly portions of her mistress into it. It was a matter, Anne could see, of disposing the bulges where there was room for them, but naturally she could not say such a thing out loud, and could only communicate with the frantic maid by means of eyes and eyebrows. Between them they achieved it at last, and hooked up. Some of the spare Lady Murray was worked round under the armpits, and the rest went towards giving her a more than usually magnificent bosom, which Anne thought would come in very useful for displaying Lady Murray’s diamonds.

On the other hand, it was clear from her ladyship’s rising colour that breathing and moving in the gown were likely to be restricted, while eating would be quite out of the question. Anne summoned all her reserves of tact and said, ‘It is a very handsome gown, ma’am, and the colour suits you to perfection. I think, though, that your notion of having Simpkins go over all the seams by hand was a good one. French makers don’t seem to have quite the same way with seams as our English ones.’

Behind Lady Murray’s back, Simpkins gaped at Anne with astonishment and incipient fury, and then realised what her plan was. She swallowed. ‘Quite right, m’lady,’ she said tonelessly. ‘It’s not the sort of work I like to see in a finished gown.’ She gave Anne a grim nod of approval, and probably at that moment almost regarded Anne as an equal.

Miss Murray’s gown was of white mousseline de soie covered with tiny raised gold spots, cut very low in the front, and with tiny puffed sleeves that left the neck, shoulders and arms bare. Salton, round-eyed, murmured to Anne that it was little better than a nightdress, and that she knew what her mother would have said if she had dared to go into a public place in such a thing. Anne’s help was required in sewing some padding into the bosom, for the deep décolletage revealed that Miss Murray had not been generously endowed by nature. She made up for it, however, by having golden hair which, since her crop was now growing out, Salton was able to arrange to great advantage. Caroline’s hair was only mouse-fair, but she was the prettier of the two, and plump as a young chicken, and she looked very well in her gown of pale blue silk with an overdress of spider-gauze.

Lady Murray had reached the stage of deciding which of her jewellery she would lend to her daughters for the occasion when, two days before the ball, she was stricken with a heavy cold, and retired to her chamber. Anne was summoned to the bed of pain.

‘You see, Miss Peters, how ailing I am,’ Lady Murray said tragically. ‘I may recover in time for the ball, but in case I do not, you must be prepared to chaperone Miss Murray and Miss Caroline. You must furbish up one of your gowns into something suitable to the occasion. Simpkins will help you.’

‘Thank you ma’am,’ Anne said, ‘but I’m sure you will be well again in time.’

Lady Murray waved her away, and Anne left, retaining a grave expression until she was outside the door. Then she could not repress a grin of delight. She was quite sure Lady Murray would not be better in time, and what unmarried female of twenty-three could help feeling an upsurge of joy at the prospect of going to a ball, even if she were only going as a chaperone. She had no intention of furbishing up an old gown: two days, even if she had to work all night, was long enough for her to make a new one, and she had not been looking in shop windows for the last six months for nothing. She knew exactly what she wanted, and she had sufficient of her wages saved to buy the material.

Simpkins’ recently acquired approval of her stretched far enough to advise against the expense. ‘For who knows but what her la’ship will decide to go at the last minute anyway, even if she is still sneezing? And then what chance will you have to wear it? And in any case, no one will see it. You’ll be sitting down in a corner all evening.’

‘I know all that,’ Anne said, ‘but I shall have the pleasure of it myself, don’t you see? I must have something pretty, just once, even if no one but me ever sees it.’

Simpkins sniffed. ‘Well, a fool and her money’s soon parted, if you ask me. But I’ll help you cut out and make up, if you like. Only you’d better not be too fine, or her la’ship’ll have it off your back before you can say knife. And you’ll have to wear a cap, or she’ll think you’re being forward.’

‘Of course, I understand. Thank you,’ Anne said, smiling so rapturously that the dresser felt almost sorry for a moment for the disappointment she felt was coming Anne’s way. Still, she shrugged, each to the devil his own way, and stumped off to answer my lady’s bell.

Lady Murray’s cold, far from improving, worsened to the point where even she could not think herself fit to attend the ball. So on the evening in question, it was Anne who went to the young ladies’ sitting-room to usher them downstairs. Her new gown was of Italian crepe, light grey, with a dusky-pink silk underdress, which she thought was both sober and becoming. The bodice was shawl-cut, and therefore revealed little of her bosom, but it had very clever Russian sleeves, which had robbed her of a great deal of sleep, for they were extremely difficult to set, and needed a great many tiny stitches. She had draped a shawl of plain grey Albany gauze caught around her elbows, and even with her hair covered by a Mameluke cap, she felt she did not look ike a dowdy.

Her opinion was soon confirmed. ‘Oh, Miss Peters, you do look nice,’ said the good-natured Caroline as she entered the room. ‘And you have such a way of wearing a shawl! I wish I might wear mine as well.’

Miss Murray only looked sour. ‘Do hurry up, Miss Peters. We have been waiting for you this age. Has Mama seen your dress? Does she approve it?’

‘Of course,’ Anne said quietly. In fact Lady Murray had been half asleep and not inclined to be disturbed and had waved her away without more than a glance.

‘Have you the sewing-things in your reticule in case anything should tear?’ Miss Murray pursued. ‘I’m sure it will be a dreadful squeeze.’

‘I have; but if you loop up your train as I have shown you, and don’t lean towards your partner when you dance, then you won’t have your hem trodden on,’ Anne said mildly.

‘It’s only that silly Gregory de l’Aude she leans towards,’ Caroline said wittily. ‘She’s spoony on him, and he has such big feet he can hardly help treading on some part of her if they are in the same room together.’

‘Miss Caroline, where did you learn such language?’ Anne rebuked her. If Miss Murray were put in a bad mood, it would be she who would suffer.

‘His feet are not big,’ Miss Murray retorted, reddening with anger. ‘They’re the right size for his height. Just because you only dance with little, undersized men, Caro—’

‘Now that’s enough, young ladies,’ Anne said hastily. ‘If you are quite ready, we had better go down to the drawing-room. You know your father hates to be kept waiting.’

Sir Ralph was alone, pacing up and down the room and occasionally wrestling his watch out of his tight fob in order to suck his teeth at it. Hartley Murray was dining with friends and going on to the ball with them, though Anne privately doubted whether he would arrive much before the end.

‘You’re late,’ Sir Ralph snapped as they entered. ‘The carriage has been ready ten minutes. Miss Peters, you understand your duties? I may be called away during the evening to one or other of the embassies. If I am not present at the end of the ball, it will be for you to see the young ladies are brought home safely.’

‘Yes, Sir Ralph.’

‘And pay particular attention to their partners. To be on the safe side, you had better not give permission for them to dance with anyone who has not actually been received here at this house.’

‘I understand, Sir Ralph,’ said Anne, seeing out of the corner of her eye the downward curve Miss Murray’s mouth had taken.

‘And take particular care to remain nearby during supper. It is important that you are seen to be present. There is a great deal of informality at the Tuileries, but remember we shall not be in Paris much longer, and it is by our own countrymen that we shall be judged when we are back at home.’

‘Yes, Sir Ralph,’ Anne said, suppressing a desire to blurt out questions. Not be in Paris much longer? What, then, was in the air? It was the first time that any hint had been given of the termination of their visit, and, looking at the frown puckering her employer’s brow, Anne felt sure he would not have given away so much now if his mind had not been on other things.

Chapter Three

Despite Sir Ralph’s complaints, they were still among the early arrivals when their carriage turned from the rue de Rivoli into the Carrousel. The First Consul, like the French kings before him, frequently used this enormous open square for parades and military reviews; today it was empty but for the ceremonial guard. The Murrays’ carriage drove round the central triumphal arch, surmounted with the great bronze horses of Byzantium which the French had stolen from the San Marco Basilica in Venice seven years before, and joined the tail of coaches working their way towards the main entrance of the palace. It was a splendidly ornate edifice, built in the Renaissance style for Catherine de’ Medici, and though the interior had suffered badly during the violent days of the Revolution, it had been restored, repainted, and stocked anew with fine furnishings, carpets, pictures and porcelain, many of which had come from other royal palaces, now in state hands.

‘This Bonaparte lives as well as a king,’ Lady Murray had complained many times since their arrival last November; but no one could resist the charm of Madame Josephine, and there was no regal stiffness or ponderous etiquette about the Consul’s court. Elegant equality was the watchword, the best of the Ancien Régime mingling with the best of the Republic.

Anne went with the Miss Murrays to an ante-room to ensure that the ten-minute sojourn in the carriage had not impaired their toilette, and then accompanied them into the ballroom, taking up an unobtrusive position amongst the chaperones from which she could watch the arrivals. This must be her pleasure. If she had attended this ball as her father’s daughter, she could have looked forward to dancing every dance, for an English admiral was the equal of anyone short of a governor or head of state. As it was, she could only sit and watch, and her active part would be confined to pinning up a hem or securing a loose curl if her young ladies should dance too vigorously.

And yet the ball was a glittering affair. To be present in any capacity was an honour, something of which she knew she was much more aware than her heedless young charges. Their minds were on their own appearance and the prospect of partners; that they might be witnessing history in the making was beyond them to appreciate.

Representatives were arriving from all the courts of Europe. The Whitworths were there, of course, casting cold looks upon the First Consul and his closest advisors: the feline Cambacérès, bachelor and gourmet with exquisite but occasionally bizarre tastes; Joseph Fouché, a grey-visaged, cold-eyed man who had already served both the late King Louis and Robespierre, for whom he was rumoured to have carried out hideous atrocities in the provinces during the Terror; and gentle, upright Armand de Caulaincourt, a noble of the old school, fearless, frank, and courteous, whom Beugnot had called the only completely honest man in Europe.

There were the representatives of Prussia and Saxony and Austria, and a little dark man, unmistakeably Italian, whom Anne thought must be from the court of the Two Sicilies. And now here was the Russian Ambassador, Markov, with his party. Anne had not expected to find so much to interest her in the appearance of the Russians, and indeed, they looked very much like anyone else, dressed in French style, though perhaps with rather more colour and jewellery about them, and certainly more appearance of enjoying themselves than the English.

Count Kirov entered at the Ambassador’s shoulder, evidently deep in conversation with him. He was the taller man and had to bend his head to reach Markov’s ear. The Ambassador turned his head and replied, and both men laughed. Then the Count straightened up and scanned the room, as anyone might who had just arrived at a ball. Why, then, did Anne feel it necessary to shrink back, as though afraid his eye might fall on her, and why again did she feel faintly disappointed when it did not?

The dancing began, and after the first formal minuets, the couples began to form sets for the country dancing. The Miss Murrays were spared any agony of doubt, for their hands had been solicited long before, and having seen her charges walk off with their partners in perfect propriety, Anne was able to resume her seat and allow her eye to wander. It was odd, she thought, how much in evidence Count Kirov seemed to be. Everywhere she looked, it was on him that her eye alighted. Of course, he was a tall man, amongst the tallest present. He had been walking about the margins of the room, and now was leading a splendidly jewelled lady, one of the Prussian Ambassador’s party, to the top set.

Nothing at all unexpected happened until the end of the second supper interval. Then, in the press towards the door leading out of the supper-room, Anne became separated from the Miss Murrays, who had been making themselves disagreeable to her because she had baulked their plan to eat their supper with their partners, unsupervised. Trying to edge herself out of the main stream of bodies by which she had been caught up, Anne unluckily found herself in the immediate vicinity of Lady Whitworth, whose diamond bracelet caught for a moment in Anne’s shawl. The former duchess, who had not noticed that she was attached, moved her arm abruptly and tugged it free. The ripping sound caught her attention, and she looked round briefly to see what had happened. An expression of annoyance crossed her face at having been in such close proximity to a person of inferior status, and Anne shrank back, a flush of anger and distress colouring her cheeks. Lady Whitworth passed on, and Anne managed at last to wedge herself into a corner where she could examine the damage.

There was an ugly three-cornered rent in the delicate gauze, the edges of which were so frayed that it would be impossible to mend it invisibly. Anne was still mourning over her ruined finery when a gentleman coming out of the supper-room bumped her elbow painfully with the hilt of his dress sword, and she was almost vexed enough to cry out.

But the gentleman paused, and a familiar voice said, ‘Miss Peters! What a pleasant surprise. But I hope I did not hurt you? A thousand pardons, mademoiselle.’

Anne felt her cheeks grow warm. She had hardly expected the Count to notice her again, particularly at so glittering an occasion, but he was looking at her with such friendly concern that she automatically smiled and answered him lightly.

‘For so small an offence, sir, one would suffice,’ she said.

‘You are too generous, mademoiselle. And this is a famous way to renew my acquaintance with you, to begin by knocking you about! You will think me nothing but a clumsy fool.’

‘Anything but that, sir. Did not Cicero say, “The mind of the man is the man himself”?’

The Count raised his eyebrows. ‘Now you have really surprised me. Do you understand Latin too, mademoiselle? But no, I mistake. I am not really surprised. It is stupidity which is always so surprising, not intelligence. It is a pleasant ball, is it not? Pleasure shows everyone to advantage. It seems to make the women appear more handsome and the men more distinguished. Are you having an agreeable time?’

‘I was sir, until I fell foul of a diamond bracelet,’ Anne said, displaying the rent in her shawl. It seemed so natural to talk to him that she found it impossible to be formal, or to check his disastrous tendency to be friendly.

‘Oh, what a pity,’ the Count said. ‘And such a delicate gauze! It is beyond mending, I fear. But perhaps if you cut it down, you might make a fichu of it. It is too pretty to be quite wasted.’

She looked at him with amusement. ‘Do you understand such things, sir? It is not the way with English gentlemen.’

‘In Russia we take a great interest in clothes. We understand fine materials. And jewels, also. We Russians understand jewels better than anyone in the world.’ He surveyed her with a practised eye. ‘Your gown is very elegant, mademoiselle, and very becoming, but you should have a necklace. Diamonds would look very well with your colouring, or pearls. No, diamonds, I think, at the neck and in the hair. And not the cap – caps are for old ladies.’

This talk of diamonds embarrassed Anne. ‘For old ladies, and for chaperones, sir,’ she said lightly. ‘I think you have forgotten my station in life.’

The Count looked suddenly serious. ‘Forgotten your station? Yes, I understand you very well, mademoiselle, better than you understand me! The English speak of loving their children, but they place them in the care of people they despise. In Russia it is not so. In Russia, a governess is treated with honour, for she is someone whom we regard as most fit to care for and instruct those dearest to our hearts. We love our children, and entrust them only to those we admire and respect.’

Anne was too confused to reply. She lowered her eyes, and managed only to mutter, ‘Sir, I beg you will not–’

The Count spoke again, in a cheerful, matter- of-fact way. ‘But tell me, Miss Peters, what do you think of the First Consul? An able man, there is no doubt, but what is your observation?’

Anne recovered herself with an effort. ‘He smiles with his mouth, but not with his eyes,’ she said. ‘I think I would find him rather frightening, if ever I should come close to him.’

The Count nodded. ‘You show more discernment than the British Ambassador,’ he said, dropping without appearing to notice it into French, which evidently came more naturally to him. ‘Lord Whitworth thinks him vulgar, ambitious, and unscrupulous. He hates him, but does not fear him, and that is a man I think it will never do to underestimate.’

‘I’m sure you are right. But do you not think the Consul ambitious?’ Anne replied in the same language. ‘It seems to me he wishes to rule all of Europe.’

‘For its own good,’ the Count said with a faint smile. ‘To free all nations from the tyranny of monarchy.’

‘And unite them under the rule of one man, and that man himself,’ Anne concluded gravely. ‘Pardon me, I am mistaken. Of course he is not ambitious.’

‘And what will be the end of it? You think we shall have war again? Well, I agree with you. This peace was never made of very strong cloth, and now it wears thin.’

‘And what then, sir?’ Anne could not help an edge of anxiety creeping into her voice. ‘Who will win? Voltaire says that God is always on the side of the big battalions.’

‘Then God will have a hard task in choosing. The battalions will be big on both sides. If war comes, it will be bad, very bad.’ The word was unemphatic, but the expression on the Count’s face was chilling. ‘There are no victors in war. Everyone suffers, and afterwards, no one can ever remember what it was all about.’

‘Do you think it will come soon?’ Anne asked quietly.

He met her eyes. ‘Yes, soon. The tension grows daily. Myself, I believe that Bonaparte would rather delay matters, but he will make no concessions unless your country evacuates Malta. He has said too often and too publicly that he will have the Treaty, and nothing but the Treaty.’

‘I cannot believe the Government will give up Malta,’ Anne said. ‘From what I have heard my father say, it is as important a naval base as Gibraltar. They will think even war is better than losing Malta.’

‘Between ourselves, mademoiselle, Malta is nothing more than an excuse. Your Lord Whitworth is sent new instructions almost daily, to make ever more stringent demands. If it seems that one set will be met, then there comes another. Someone in England wants war, and is determined to have it.’

‘Oh no, I can’t believe it,’ Anne said. But the Peace had never been popular in England, coming as it did, not after a great victory, but as the result of a stalemate; and there were a great many powerful men whose business would benefit by the resumption of war.

The Count, a slight smile on his lips, seemed to be watching these thoughts pass through her head as though she were quite transparent. Provoked, she asked, ‘But, pray, how do you know about Lord Whitworth’s instructions, sir?’

His eyes shone with amusement. ‘We Russians know everything. We have a special arrangement with God for being right. And now, mademoiselle, since we have determined world history between us, and this is, after all, a ballroom, perhaps we should turn to more important things. Will you do me the honour of dancing with me when the ball resumes?’

Again Anne realised how far she had forgotten herself. She looked up at him, shocked. ‘Oh no, sir, you must not ask me! It is quite, quite impossible!’

He smiled easily. ‘Indeed. Am I so very repulsive to you, mademoiselle?’

Her cheeks burned with confusion and distress. ‘Sir, you don’t understand. It is bad enough that I should converse with you, but as to dancing with you – why, even your asking me, if it were known, would bring severe reproof upon me! It would be thought most improper. No, no, you must not! I am a governess. It will not do.’

‘You are mistaken, mademoiselle,’ the Count said cheerfully. ‘I am an old acquaintance of your father, and as such may quite properly ask you to dance. But I see Sir Ralph Murray has just come in by the far door. Lest you should be embarrassed, I shall go and explain the matter to him and ask his permission to ask you.’

‘Oh no, sir, please do not! He would very much dislike it. And Lady Murray would be so angry.’

‘I have observed Lady Murray closely, and if I know anything about humanity, she will only be flattered. How could any grande dame object to being reminded that her governess is so well-connected?’ His voice was all sweet reason, but Anne was sure that there was a light of mischief in his eyes as he bowed to her and, without allowing her more argument, walked away.

Sick with apprehension, Anne watched him approach Sir Ralph, bow, and speak to him. She saw her employer’s expression change from one of polite interest to astonishment, saw the immediate shake of the head as the Count made his request, followed by a growing bewilderment as the explanation expanded. It was, of course, impossible for Sir Ralph to refuse, and that alone would have secured his displeasure. He summoned Anne with a crook of the finger, and astonishment and disapproval were equally in evidence as he relayed the substance of the Count’s words. It was clear that he was not in the least flattered that this eminent man wished to dance, not with one of his daughters, but with his daughters’ chaperone; and only a lifetime in diplomacy prevented him from betraying stark disbelief that the Russian had ever been acquainted with her father.

At the beginning of the ball, Anne had sighed because she could not dance; now, as Count Kirov led her scarlet-faced into the set, and she felt the disapproving eyes of every English matron upon her, she would have been grateful to have resumed her former obscurity. In spite of the prospect of half an hour’s free converse with him, she would have been glad just then to find herself back in her room in Margaret Street, with a cold in the head and a heap of stockings to dam.

The ball ended with fireworks, soup and pasties, and since Hartley Murray had not arrived at the ball at all, and Sir Ralph had gone off with Lord Whitworth to the embassy to work, it was left to Anne to escort the young ladies home. As they waited in the foyer for the carriage, Anne thought she intercepted some pointed and hostile looks, and felt sure she was being talked about. The atmosphere seemed to her so electric that she was surprised that the Miss Murrays did not notice it; but they chattered happily about the ball, their partners, their flirts and the toilettes of every other woman they could put a name to, with complete unconcern. Astonishing though it seemed, it was evident that they had neither seen Anne dancing, nor had heard of it from anyone else.

On the short journey to the rue St Augustine, Anne sat with her eyes cast down and reflected upon the evening and the probable consequences. How could she have been so foolish as to talk to the Count so freely? It was from that that all her troubles had arisen. True, their meeting at the ball was the purest accident, but he would not have asked her to dance but for their previous conversation on the Îie de la Cité. That was when she should have discouraged him by being properly formal.

Folly! Contemptible, dangerous folly! Of course, she could give plenty of reasons – her loneliness; the longing for intelligent conversation, for human warmth; the flattering nature of his interest in her, and the way he treated her as an equal, not only socially but intellectually; her pique and anger at the accident to her shawl and Lady Whitworth’s contemptuous curl of the lip – but reasons were not excuses.

What then if she were gently born? What if her intellect had gone unexercised for as long as she had been trying to teach these bacon-brained young girls, and fetching and carrying for their even more witless mama? She was what she was, a governess, and must keep her place. She was guilty of the sin of pride, and would be punished.

But what punishment? She went cold when she contemplated the worst that might happen to her. The Murrays might cast her out without a character, and then, unprotected in a foreign country, she would starve, or worse, fall a prey to some fate too hideous to contemplate. Lady Murray was not a cruel woman, but she was very conscious of her position in the world. Perhaps they would at least take her back to England with them before turning her off. To be destitute in one’s native land seemed somehow less terrifying. Without a reference she would not be able to get another place with a respectable family, but in England she might perhaps be able to find a position in a school – an unfashionable one where they were less particular. Miss Oliver might help her to find a place, however mean, where she could earn enough to keep body and soul together.

And then, simply in reaction to these dreadful pictures, she thought that perhaps it would not be so bad. Perhaps Lady Murray would do no more than reprimand her, and her punishment would be to endure humiliation and a certain degree of suspicion for a time. That would be bad enough, but if she might escape a worse fate, it would be as well to humble herself before her mistress and beg forgiveness.

For an instant her pride reared up. She was a gentlewoman: Admiral Peters’ daughter! Count Kirov had sought her out, had led her into the set, and had danced opposite her with as warm a smile as he had bestowed upon the wife of the Prussian Ambassador. She hugged the memory of that dance and its conversation to her for a moment. Though she had walked to the set scarlet with embarrassment and apprehension, it had been delightful to take her proper place in the world. If her father had lived, she might have gone to such a ball and danced every dance and never even noticed that the Miss Murrays existed! Was she to be punished for doing what she was born to?

The carriage halted with a jerk outside the house and brought her back to reality, and she busied herself with collecting up reticules and fans and retrieving Caroline’s glove, trampled and soiled, from the carriage floor before alighting. She followed the young ladies up the steps into the foyer, and, as they began climbing the stairs, chattering like magpies as they told the story of their triumphs all over again to Simpkins and Salton, Anne was only too glad to make her way directly to bed.

She woke early, and since there was no likelihood that her young ladies would stir before noon, she had all the longer in the company of her own thoughts. One of the maids told her that Mr Hartley had not come home last night, and that Sir Ralph was in a terrible taking about it. From the distance of her room, Anne heard some of his fury reverberating about the house. Silence fell when he left to go about his business, and Anne sat quietly and got on with her sewing, wondering whether he had spoken to Lady Murray before he left, and when the summons would come.

It did not come until the early hours of the afternoon, when the young ladies were astir and had sent for trays in their room. Lady Murray was up, but not dressed when Anne entered her room. She had stationed herself on the day bed by the fireplace, and her cold had evidently passed from the feverish into the merely tiresome stage. She greeted Anne with a grave and nasal, ‘Come in, Miss Peters. I wish to speak to you.’

Anne closed the door behind her, and stood facing her mistress. Lady Murray surveyed her with cold disapproval, and Anne was surprised to discover that even in her extravagantly flounced and beribboned wrapper, she did not, for once, look ridiculous. Roused from her usual good-natured vacancy, she had attained to a kind of dignity. Anne found that her hands were trembling, and folded them together in front of her to keep them still.

‘Miss Peters,’ Lady Murray began at last, ‘I am at a loss what to say to you. I am profoundly shocked. I never should have thought that a young woman of your education could so forget herself, and forget what was due to her employers, too. We have given you every consideration. Why, I don’t suppose there are three governesses in all of England who live so well as you do – and on such terms with the family – and yet this is how you repay us! Presumption, impertinence, and a total want of consideration for our good name! Perhaps it is not well to talk of ingratitude between employer and employee, but I should have thought that your sense of duty alone, if not your sense of decency, would have prevented you from making such a spectacle of yourself in a public place. Sir Ralph was shocked beyond measure, and when he told me, I found it hard to believe such a thing could happen! But to dance in that wanton way, you, a governess! And taken to the ball as chaperone to my girls. How could you do it, Miss Peters?’

For all her intentions, Anne was unable to prevent herself from rising to her own defence.

‘Indeed, ma’am, I am very sorry it happened, very sorry indeed, and nothing could have been further from my wishes; but I do not know how I could have refused, when the Count had asked permission, and had been given it–’

‘Given permission?’ Lady Murray cried. ‘And how, pray, could Sir Ralph do anything else but give it, in front of everyone, when he had been asked? He was placed in an intolerable position.’

‘And how, ma’am, could I do anything else but accept?’ Anne retorted.

‘Do not answer me back, Miss Peters!’ Lady Murray said, reddening with anger. ‘You know perfectly well that none of this would have happened if you had not encouraged his attentions. Gentlemen do not customarily ask chaperones to dance at embassy balls! A pretty world it would be if they did!’

‘He did not ask me, ma’am, because I was a chaperone, but because he was a friend of my father,’ Anne said desperately.

‘Aye, so he said. But as to that, it would be more likely if he had other things on his mind than old friends when he took it into his head to notice you. A count and a governess? I know what everyone at the ball thought about that! What would you make of it, Miss Peters, if you heard it of someone else?’

Anne’s eyes filled with tears of hurt and anger at the dreadful suggestion. She struggled against them for a moment, and stammered, ‘I did not – there was never – there was nothing improper in anything he said or did! Indeed there was not! You must believe me!’

Lady Murray sniffed irritably. ‘Well, well, yes, I believe you. Do stop crying, Miss Peters. I only say that that is what everyone will believe. And you did very wrong, you know you did, to speak to him at all, and encourage him in that way.’

‘I am very sorry,’ Anne began, but was interrupted.

‘Sorry? I should think you may! I do not know what will come of this night’s work, indeed I do not. I shall have to ask Sir Ralph what is right to do about it. There is no possibility of concealment. Why, already this morning I have had a note from Mrs Anstruther, the cat, asking me in such a way whether I was having my girls instructed in the Russian language! It will be all over Paris before the day’s out. You have made us look so particular, and you know I hate anything of that sort. It is bad enough to have Hartley talked of, though it is only what everyone’s sons seem to do, but people will wonder how our girls are being brought up, if their governess acts in such a peculiar fashion. You should have thought how it would reflect on them. It is too much, really it is, to have them brought to shame by such a one as you.’

This was too much to bear. Anne was stung into her own defence. ‘I do not think I have done anything so very bad, ma’am,’ she began.

‘It is not for you to judge, Miss Peters,’ Lady Murray said crossly. ‘Sir Ralph and I are most seriously displeased, and we shall have to decide what is best to be done with you. Naturally there is no question of your continuing to teach my daughters. It would be better perhaps if we were to send you home to England immediately – that would be the quickest way to have this matter forgotten. For the moment you will remain in your room, and I shall ask Sir Ralph when he returns what is to be done about your wages.’

Anne drew herself up stiffly. ‘There is no necessity to put yourself to the trouble of consulting Sir Ralph, ma’am,’ she said. ‘I shall leave at once and find myself other employment.’

‘Highty-tighty!’ Lady Murray retorted, growing red. ‘What, pray, do you think you could do? Other employment, indeed! And don’t think I shall give you a reference, for I shan’t! Mrs Cowley Crawford was right about you. She warned me from the very beginning that you gave yourself airs because of your education. What use is an education to a female, pray tell me that? Where has it got you? For all that I can see, it adds nothing to refinement or delicacy.’

‘Now you have insulted me in every possible way,’ Anne said, fighting her rising temper, ‘and I must beg you to excuse me. I shall pack my things at once.’ And she withdrew and closed the door behind her while she was still able to do so quietly.

Upstairs in her room she gave vent to her pent-up feelings by throwing herself down on her bed and bursting into tears. They had more to do with rage than unhappiness, and lasted ten minutes, at the end of which time she sat up feeling much better, blew her nose, and was able in relative calmness to consider her situation.

There was no possibility of her staying here. Even had the Murrays been willing to overlook her first crime of dancing with the Count, and her second crime of refusing to acknowledge the first, her pride would not now allow her to back down from the position she had taken up. Besides, she had become aware of how much servitude had always irked her, although she had always hidden the fact from herself. She felt that any employment, however mean, which would release her from it, would be better than this luxurious enslavement.

Why should she not stay here in Paris and find herself employment? There must be something she could do, and she spoke French now almost as well as English. She could find some cheap but decent lodging, and get herself work as – as – her roving eye fell on the nightgown she had been altering for Miss Murray when the summons had come. Of course! She was a skilled needlewoman and accustomed to making her own gowns, and Paris was the home of fashion: she could get employment with a mantuamaker. Nothing could be easier! And in time, she might start up her own business. She had seen for herself how the leading mantuamakers in Paris were received everywhere, and even made excellent marriages. It was an eminently respectable calling.

Having thought of the scheme, she could not wait to put it into effect. She jumped up and changed into a plain but well-cut walking-dress of her own making, which she felt would be the best advertisement for her skills, tidied her hair, put on her hat and pelisse, and, going down by the backstairs in case the Miss Murrays were about, left the house and began walking down the rue St Roch towards the main shopping thoroughfare.

As luck would have it, as soon as she turned the comer, she bumped into Mr Hartley Murray, strolling along hatless and looking somewhat the worse for wear. He put his hand automatically to his bare head, stared at it in a rather fuddled way, and then realising who she was gave her a slight bow and a broad grin.

‘Miss Peters! Well, here’s a famous coincidence. What’re you doing out so early?’

‘It isn’t so early, Mr Murray,’ Anne replied cautiously, realising he was probably not entirely sober. ‘It is well past noon.’

‘That’s early for me,’ he said, rubbing his hand over his unshaven chin. ‘When I dine with Sauvechasse and de l’Aude, anything before five in the afternoon is early. A famous dinner we had last night, I can tell you! We did not even sit down to it before ten o’clock, neither.’

‘Your absence from the ball was noted,’ she said, amused by his naive pride in eating so late.

‘Who says I wasn’t there? No one can prove it,’ he said with a wink. ‘For one thing, the guv’nor wasn’t there himself a lot of the time; and for another, de l’Aude dropped in on it before he joined us for dinner, and told me all about it, and who my sisters danced with, so I can make a good enough tale of it to satisfy Mama.’ He grinned slowly, as one in possession of a good joke. ‘And he told me about your little adventure, Miss Peters!’

‘My adventure, Mr Murray?’ Anne said discouragingly.

‘Aye, Miss Innocent, dancing with Count Kirov, the Russian Ambassador’s aide! It must have been famous! De l’Aude said that all the old dowagers and pussy-cats were almost bursting when he led you into the set. And talking French with him, as if it was the simplest thing in the world! Miss Dalrymple was two down from you, and heard you as plain as anything, and told everyone. Oh, I would give worlds to have been there and seen it! How ever did you keep from laughing, Miss Peters? I know I should have died of laughing, if I’d been there.’

‘I wish everyone shared your view of the matter, Mr Murray,’ Anne said wryly. ‘Your mother, I’m afraid, is not pleased.’

‘Why should she mind?’ Hartley said easily. ‘It was all above board, for Kirov knew your pa years ago – didn’t he, Miss Peters? – and he’s old enough to be your father anyway. But he’s a capital fellow, all the same! I’m glad it was him that danced with you, of everyone, for he is a trump card, and rides the most capital bay gelding you ever saw! Sauvechasse knows all about him, and says that no one has ever beaten him at picquet, and he has the most famous hard head for liquor. It would be a famous thing for you to marry him – only that horse won’t go,’ he added with a sudden frown, ‘for he is married already, now I come to remember. But then,’ the frown clearing equally swiftly, ‘his wife might die, you know – people do – and you wouldn’t care about him being so much older than you, because females often marry men old enough to be their fathers, and no one thinks anything of it, and I don’t say he is as old as that exactly, probably not above five-and-thirty, and he rides like a Blood!’

Anne hardly knew whether despair and laughter were the more proper response to such a speech, and at the end of it, she did not manage to say more than, ‘It is quite true that the Count knew my father–’ before he had interrupted her again. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said happily. ‘It would look very well for us if you made such a splendid match. Not that counts aren’t two-a-penny in Russia, but he’s one of the rich ones, so Sauvechasse says. Only there’s this wife to get rid of. But I’m sure someone said she was sickly.’ He frowned in unaccustomed thought. ‘Yes, I’m sure that was it – he had to leave her somewhere because she wasn’t well enough to travel. Well, that’s a start, ain’t it, Miss Peters?’

Though comforted by his friendliness, Anne felt obliged to disabuse him of his tremendous ideas. ‘I am not going to marry anyone, Mr Murray, and I’m quite sure nothing could be further from the Count’s mind. Not understanding our customs, he asked me to dance from respect for my father, that was all. I beg you will not run on in that way. Your father, I know, was far from regarding it as a compliment to your family.’

Hartley yawned hugely, and said, ‘Oh, the guv’nor has better things to do than worry about balls, I can tell you. There was the devil of a fuss at the embassy last night, lights burning until all hours, and the upshot of it is, we shall all be off home any time now. I wish they would get on with it, and do away with this nonsensical peace. I mean to get Pa to buy me a commission as soon as ever the war starts, and then there’ll be some fun at last! It’ll be a famous lark, I warrant you! Sauvechasse was in the last one, and he says there’s nothing like it, only he says one must get into one of the proper fighting regiments, not one of these fancy Dragoons outfits that do nothing but drill and visit their tailors three times a week.’ He yawned again. ‘I dare say Mama will kick up a fuss about it, and want me to join a fashionable cavalry regiment. Well, we shall see. Where was you off to, anyway, Miss Peters, when I bumped into you? No, let me guess – the mantuamakersl’

He grinned triumphantly at his own perspicacity, and Anne was glad enough to be able to agree truthfully.

‘You guess right, Mr Murray.’

‘Those sisters of mine will never rest until they have bought up Paris! If I don’t bankrupt the guv’nor, they’ll go far to doing it; and however they’ll get all their clothes back to England without sinking the ship, I don’t know. Well, I’m off home for a clean shirt, and then back to the club. Harrington and Markby and some of the others have some notion of joining the German mercenaries when the war starts. I must say the idea of being out from under the guv’nor’s eye, and away from all the old pussy-cats and their wagging tongues, appeals mightily.

Good day, Miss Peters. If the Count calls, I’ll tell him to wait for you!’

He grinned happily at his own wit, attempted again to raise his missing hat, and ambled away round the corner. Anne watched him go with half a smile, and more fellow-feeling than she had ever thought to have for him, and then resumed her own way towards the first of the dressmaking establishments in the rue St Honoré.

Chapter Four

So preoccupied had Anne been with her own immediate problems that Hartley’s words about the imminence of war had hardly impinged on her. He was, in any case, one of the world’s worst rattles, and not to be relied on for accuracy. So when she returned to number eight rue St Augustine at the end of the day, she was not prepared for the scene of confusion which greeted her.

She went in by the service door and ran cheerfully up the backstairs, well satisfied with the result of her endeavours. She had found herself a position with a mantuamaker, which, if it did not promise much immediately, was at least the first step on the ladder, and at the recommendation of her new employer had also secured herself a room in a lodging-house which was clean and conveniently placed. She had thus made herself independent of the Murrays, which alone was enough to put a spring in her step.

Half-way up the stairs, one of the French housemaids pushed past her brusquely with an armful of linen. Then, as she passed the end of the second-floor passage, the maid Salton shot out of the young ladies’ room like a peeled grape, impelled by Miss Murray’s voice crying shrilly, ‘And don’t come back until you’ve found it!’

Anne stopped in surprise. There were boxes standing in the passage, the chair outside the door was heaped with clothes, and from inside the room came the sound of the Miss Murrays chattering excitedly. Anne could not hear what they were saying, but she could tell from the tone of their voices that something tremendous had happened.

‘Salton, what is it? Are you packing?’ she asked.

The maid, who had been scurrying in the other direction, span round at the sound of her voice, and cried, ‘Oh Miss, there you are! Thank heaven! Miss Murray’s in such a taking, for I can’t find her nightgown with the Marseilles frocking, and there’s Miss Caroline’s boxes to be done as well, and her taking everything out again as fast as I can put it in, and both of them argufying about whose is what, and I don’t know how ever I am to get done if you don’t come and help me. Couldn’t you p’raps take them away somewhere and read to them, Miss? They’ll have everything out again by the time I’m back, even if I can find the nightgown at all, which I’m sure it must have been stolen by that laundress, for I’ve looked everywhere else I can think of.’

‘It’s all right, Salton, I have it in my room,’ Anne said quickly. ‘I was altering it for Miss Murray, don’t you remember? Come with me now, and I’ll give it to you. But why are you packing? Has something happened?’

‘Why, Miss, didn’t you know?’ Salton said, round-eyed, as she panted up the stairs behind her. ‘We’re all leaving. Master came home two hours since, and said as how everyone was going as soon as possible, and Mistress gave orders to pack right away. New instructions from home, it seems, Miss. Master was with Lord Whitworth and the Russian Ambassador all day–’

‘The Russian Ambassador?’ Anne exclaimed.

‘Yes, Miss, because nobody knew which way the King of Russia was going to jump, with Malta and all that, and now Betson says Master says he’s going to side with the French, so we must go home, Miss, that’s what I heard.’

‘Yes, Salton, well never mind it now,’ Anne said, realising she could not hope for a clearer account of the political situation from a harassed serving-maid. ‘Come and fetch the nightgown, and I’ll see what I can do to help you.’

But she had no sooner handed over the nightdress, and a heap of silk stockings which had been given her to darn because Lady Murray said they never sat right after Simpkins had been at them, when a housemaid came in to say that Miss Peters was wanted in at once in Lady Murray’s room. Anne paused only to take off her hat and pelisse, and went down to face whatever new odium was waiting for her.

Lady Murray’s room also bore the signs of imminent departure, but there was no confusion here, for Simpkins was an expert packer, and Lady Murray would never have dreamed of interfering with her. Her ladyship was still on the day bed, and still in her wrapper, but she had her writing-case on her lap and appeared to be in the middle of writing a note. Anne had hardly ever before seen her with a pen in her hand, and it may have been the memory of Anne’s services in that department which made her speak more civilly than probably she had intended.

‘Ah, Miss Peters, there you are. I have been sending to your room for you half the day.’

‘I went out, ma’am,’ Anne said briefly. Lady Murray looked as though she meant to challenge this statement, but having regard to the angle of Anne’s chin, changed her mind.

‘Well, never mind that now. As you see, we are packing everything. Sir Ralph says we must be ready to leave at a moment’s notice, though he does not know exactly when the orders will come. When you have packed your own box you had better help Salton with the Miss Murrays’ boxes, for I dare say she is behind as usual. Sir Ralph says we shall have to travel post, which I detest above all things, so you will have to travel with Miss Caroline, for there will be no stopping if she is sick, and I cannot have her in the carriage with me.’

‘I, ma’am?’ Anne said, raising her eyebrows. ‘What can you mean?’

Lady Murray frowned crossly. ‘Don’t pretend to be stupid, Miss Peters. You will travel with us only as far as London, of course, and I hope I can trust you to comport yourself properly during the journey. You will attend Miss Caroline, who I dare say will be dreadfully sick, but we must travel quickly when we go, though I don’t think I quite understand why. Then Sir Ralph has said that he will pay you a month’s salary in lieu of notice, which I consider very handsome; and – though I don’t promise it, mind – if you behave yourself extremely well between now and then, I may bring myself to give you a reference after all, though I shall have to think how to frame it, for I cannot, of course, write any untruths. But I shall say something, at all events.’

Anne listened to all this with astonishment giving way slowly before rage. She saw how it was: it had struck Lady Murray forcibly how disagreeable it would be to travel with Caroline in a state of constant upheaval, and with no one to attend her. Anne’s eyes flickered towards Simpkins, who avoided the contact and bent unnecessarily low over the box she was packing: Anne could imagine her being appealed to by her mistress and refusing, as flatly as only a dresser of her experience and annual salary could do, to have anything to do with the nursing of the unfortunate girl.

Well then, Anne could imagine Lady Murray thinking, there’s nothing for it but to reinstate Miss Peters, just until we get to London, and then turn her off there. They simply wanted to make use of her, she thought; well, they should find she had other ideas.

‘I beg your pardon, ma’am, but I shall do no such thing! My arrangements have all been made, and they do not involve travelling with any part of your family. You must get along without me as best you can,’ she said.

Lady Murray’s eyes seemed to bulge perilously, and Simpkins sucked in a breath at hearing her mistress spoken to in such a manner. ‘How dare you speak to me like that?’ her ladyship demanded, actually more astonished than affronted. ‘I have never heard of such impertinence! You will do exactly as you are told, Miss Peters, without answering me back! Go and help Salton at once and let us hear no more of this – this – effrontery!’

‘I have told you, ma’am, that I have made my arrangements,’ Anne replied with a calm she judged rightly would infuriate far more than angry words. ‘I shall not be leaving Paris. And I do not take orders from you. I am no longer in your employ. I am a free agent.’

Lady Murray uttered a sound between a gasp and a shriek. ‘What? Free agent? How dare you! Nonsense!’ she spluttered.

‘I know what you are about, ma’am,’ Anne said, enjoying her triumph, though there was a layer of sick fear underneath at her own daring. ‘You only want me to take care of Caroline because no one else will. That is what has caused this change of heart. You cannot impose on me any longer, Lady Murray.’

‘Ungrateful, unnatural girl!’ Lady Murray boomed. ‘And this is how you repay our kindness, our consideration for you! Don’t you know that there is going to be war at any moment? Sir Ralph, all magnanimity that he is, insisted that we could not leave you behind, a stranger in a foreign land, and asked me, begged me, to allow you to remain with us, for your own safety. And remain you shall! / shall decide when you leave my employ, and on what terms. Free agent, pah! I’ll give you free agent!’

‘It is pointless to continue this conversation, ma’am,’ Anne said. ‘I am over twenty-one, and will make my own decisions about my own life. You have no responsibility for me, nor authority over me. I shall go up and pack my belongings now, and go to my new lodgings. I shall send for my box tomorrow – I trust you will not object to its remaining here until the morning?’

Lady Murray had fallen back in her seat, more overcome, Anne guessed, by the mention of new lodgings than anything else that had been said. ‘I’ll have it thrown out into the street!’ she cried vengefully.

‘That must be as you choose, ma’am,’ Anne said quietly, and turned and left, hearing as she closed the door behind her the words, ‘Simpkins! My vinaigrette!’ uttered in a despairing shriek.

As she climbed the stairs to her room, Anne found herself trembling. It was not easy all at once to cast off the habits and teachings of a lifetime, and to utter words of such defiance to an elder, and one to whom she had deferred for so long. She felt emptied out, scoured, and yet exhilarated, like a bird which has made the first terrifying plunge into unsupporting air, and found it could fly. Freedom, a new life lay before her. I shall never be afraid to speak my mind again, she thought.

The following morning Anne secured the services of a man with a small handcart, and walked with him from her new lodgings just off the rue Montmartre to the rue St Augustine to collect her box. It was a fine, warm May day, and everywhere the trees were bursting into leaf, and Anne was so deep in the thoughts of how good it was to be here, in Paris, that the man’s voice quite startled her when he asked suddenly, ‘What number, miss?’

‘Number eight,’ she said. ‘Yes, this is it – oh!’ And she stopped in surprise at what had evidently aroused the man’s doubts: the knocker was off the door. The shades were drawn down over the windows, too, giving the building the unpleasantly eyeless look of the empty house.

‘They’ve gone,’ the man said helpfully. ‘Skipped, I dare say. Did they owe you money, miss?’

‘No – no, nothing like that,’ Anne said. ‘There’s just my luggage to collect. I suppose their orders must have come after I left and–’ All sorts of speculations were running through her head which were not helpful at the moment. ‘I suppose there must be a caretaker somewhere. They may have left my box with him.’

They went round to the service door, and ringing at the bell, soon roused out the elderly hall porter, who had evidently remained as caretaker. Anne was glad it was he, for he had always been friendly towards her, out of appreciation for her unvarying courtesy.

‘Oh, there you are, then, mademoiselle. Yes, I’ve got your box safe here. I’ll get it out in a moment, if this fellow will help me.’

‘The family has gone, then?’ Anne said, stepping into the back hall, and listening to the eerie silence. An occupied house, even if the inmates are not speaking or moving, is never quiet in the same way.

‘Last night, mademoiselle. A messenger came round from the Embassy at dusk, carriages were ordered, and they left at eight o’clock. They mean to travel all through the night, so it seems, for this afternoon’s packet from Calais. The old lady was very put out. You never heard such a fuss.’

Already, Anne noted, it was ‘the old lady’, a term of scant respect. ‘I was afraid my box would have been thrown out,’ she said.

The porter shook his head. ‘I’d have made sure it was safe anyway, mademoiselle. But there was so much to-ing and fro-ing, that no one even thought about it. Your name was mentioned a good bit, though. The young misses were asking for you, and the old lady didn’t seem to know whether to curse you or pray for you,’ he grinned.

‘I can imagine,’ Anne said. ‘Well, I didn’t expect it to be so sudden, but I suppose it doesn’t make any difference to me.’

‘Will it be war, then, mademoiselle?’ the porter said cautiously. ‘Is that why they have gone?’

‘I don’t know,’ Anne said. ‘I hope not. That would be very uncomfortable.’

‘Dangerous, too,’ the porter said, looking at her significantly. ‘You ought to be careful, on your own as you are.’

‘Oh, I shall be all right,’ she smiled. ‘I am of no interest to anyone. Thank you for looking after my box, anyway.’ She reached into her reticule for a coin, which the man took with graceful dexterity and made disappear.

‘It was nothing, mademoiselle. I wish you good luck. They should have taken you with them, but you are well away from them in my opinion. I used to serve the Quality – they were one thing. But these– !’ He shrugged eloquently. ‘You be careful, mademoiselle. There are some funny people about in Paris these days.’

When her box was safely back at her lodgings, and the man with the barrow paid off, Anne felt restless and a little lost. It was one thing to quit the Murrays in a blaze of independence, quite another to find they had quitted her. It came over her how very much alone she was. The last link with England was severed. She felt a little as she had felt when her father died, and she had realised that she must make her way alone through the world.

But after all, she told herself bracingly, that was nothing new. She had had to come to terms with that responsibility years ago, and she was far better able to take care of herself now. There was no point in spending the day sitting here staring at the walls, at any rate. She was not required to start work until tomorrow, so she might as well enjoy her last day of leisure to walk about the city, for she had no illusions about the sort of hours she would have to work from now on. She put on her hat and pelisse, and went out into the sunshine.

It was no difficult decision to choose her usual walk to the Île de la Cité. Apart from the consolation of the river, there was the market, which had always offered amusement, even in the darkest days of winter. She could imagine how glorious it must appear in the summer, when the great variety of flowers and fruits would spread a carpet of living colour in every direction. Now in May, the first of the spring vegetables were coming in, greens and spinach and infant peas, to supplement the winter store roots, and the polished heaps of pomegranates and oranges from across the mountains in the south, great green and purple cabbages, with leaves deckled at the edge like ladies’ skirts, and gleaming bronze onions half as big as melons.

She hurried past the aisles devoted to livestock. Quite apart from the sad-eyed swans, enduring their captivity so patiently, there were monkeys, some with their fur dyed red or green, clutching each other and shivering either with cold or fear; marmosets, parrots and puppies destined for the drawing-rooms of fine ladies; and white kids with the voices of children, destined for the table.

She had become a familiar sight to some of the tradespeople, who would often call out to her in a friendly way. Sometimes she would stop and talk to them, and they would admire the fluency of her French and the purity of her accent, and ask her what England was really like – whether it was true that everyone lived in a castle, but that the sun never shone, even in high summer. Today, however, no one greeted her, and as she paused to admire some great sheaves of vivid, scented mimosa, she had the impression that one or two people turned away rather than meet her eye.

Dismissing the idea as nonsensical, she continued across the island to the walk beside the cathedral. She was standing at the parapet gazing at the river when a hand suddenly gripped her upper arm, and at the same instant, she heard a familiar voice saying, ‘For God’s sake, what are you doing here?’

‘Oh, sir, you startled me,’ she gasped, looking up into the Count’s frowning face.

‘Not nearly as much as you have startled me!’ he said grimly. ‘Why are you still in Paris? Why did you not go with the Murrays? Don’t you know you are in danger here?’

‘Now, really, Count,’ she said with a smile, ‘you exaggerate. I am quite capable of looking after myself. And please, would you let go of my arm? You are hurting me.’

He released her automatically, as if he did not know he had done it, saying, ‘But something has been going on here. Lady Murray told me yesterday when I called that you were to go with them. She said so specifically, for though I had not asked her directly, I dare say she knew what I wanted to know.’

‘You called on Lady Murray?’ Anne said in surprise. ‘But she didn’t mention it to me.’

‘I had learned, you see,’ he said, drawing her hand through his arm and walking with her in a purposeful way along the gravelled path, ‘that by dancing with you I had caused a certain amount of – shall we say, embarrassment?’

‘Not quite the word that I would have used, sir,’ Anne said wryly.

‘It was the furthest thing from my intentions, as I’m sure you must know,’ he said apologetically. ‘So I paid Lady Murray a formal visit to try to smooth things down, and to make sure your safety was not placed in jeopardy, for it did occur to me just for a moment that she might be vindictive enough to leave you behind last night. It seems I was right.’

‘You knew they were leaving? But even Lady Murray did not know when the order would come,’ Anne said in surprise.

He made a curious grimace. ‘Miss Peters, there is no harm in your knowing now that your country and mine have been involved in some very delicate negotiations with the Consulate over the past week or so, in the hope of avoiding the war. Yesterday it became plain that no agreement was going to be reached, and as we had intercepted a secret message to your Lord Whitworth, ordering him to quit during the night–’

‘Intercepted? You mean – you have spies!’ she breathed, her eyes wide.

‘A disagreeable word, mademoiselle, for a disagreeable necessity. But how does it come about that you did not leave with the Murrays? You must have done something to annoy them, more than simply dancing with me.’

Anne decided this was not the moment to tell the whole story. ‘They did want me to go with them, but I refused the offer, and quitted their service. I prefer to stay here.’

He frowned. ‘But are you mad, Miss Peters? Don’t you know that war will be declared between England and France as soon as the Ambassador is out of the country?’

Anne shrugged. ‘I didn’t know that Lord Whitworth had left, of course. But in any case–’

‘And don’t you know that as soon as war is declared, the First Consul will arrest every English person on French soil?’

Anne stared. ‘Arrest?’

‘Yes, mademoiselle, arrest and imprison for the duration of the war, and who knows how long that will be? Five years, ten – the last war between your countries went on for a decade, did it not? Can you imagine what ten years in a French prison would do to you? Even if you survived it, your health would be impaired for ever.’

Anne thought of the market traders avoiding her eyes, and felt a shiver of fear tighten the back of her neck. ‘I didn’t know – I didn’t understand. I thought I would just live here quietly… I found myself a position with a mantuamaker, you see,’ she said ridiculously.

‘Borzhe moy!’ the Count exclaimed, turning his eyes up to heaven. He hurried her along so that she had to put in a little hop every few steps to keep up with his long-legged stride. ‘Just live here quietly, she says! Thank heaven it is not too late!’

‘Where are you taking me?’ Anne asked, a little breathlessly, as they crossed the Pont Neuf onto the Quai du Louvre.

‘To my house, where you will be safe. After that, we must think what to do with you. It will be best if we speak French from now on, mademoiselle. The order has not yet been issued, but we had better not draw attention to ourselves.’

‘Perhaps, then, sir, we should not walk so fast,’ Anne ventured, and his frown relaxed into a smile.

‘Quite right. You think, as always, very much to the point.’ He set a more moderate pace, and Anne was able to regain her breath and try to stop her head from spinning. War imminent! Herself in danger of arrest! Why had not Lady Murray made those things clear to her? But then, Anne had hardly given her a chance, had very firmly told her to mind her own business, not an experience Lady Murray could have been expected to enjoy. And in any case, Anne thought with a flash of self-knowledge, she would not so readily have believed her former mistress as she did the Count: she would have believed Lady Murray was trying to frighten her for her own purposes.

Anne sighed at the realisation that it was her pride and self-will that had heaped these difficulties on her, and the Count, who had evidently been pursuing a train of thought of his own, said, ‘I have been very much to blame in this matter. I have behaved recklessly and selfishly, and brought great trouble to you.’

‘No, no, sir, you must not blame yourself. It was by my own decision that I left the Murrays.’

‘But if I had not asked you to dance, the situation would never have arisen.’

‘That was the immediate cause, sir,’ Anne admitted, ‘but–’

‘No, no, it was all my fault. My wretched high spirits!’ he groaned. ‘When I was a cadet, I was forever playing practical jokes and finding myself in trouble. My son is the same way – he takes too strongly after me, I’m afraid. And even now, when I am supposed to be a staid and respectable diplomat, I cannot see a lion without wishing to tweak its tail.’

‘Then you mean that you danced with me only to annoy the Murrays?’ Anne asked.

‘What? No, no!’ He shook his head in self-reproach. ‘That was clumsy of me. I danced with you because I wanted to, and if it is any compliment to be asked by me, then that compliment is all your own.’ He smiled down at her. ‘I can give reasons in plenty for my bad behaviour. I have been a long time away from home, and away from my wife, whom I love dearly, and I have missed the solace of female companionship. And I so much enjoyed our conversations, brief though they were! You cannot imagine how many stupid people I have to talk to in the course of my work, and how much I long for wit and intelligence.’

‘I can imagine that very easily,’ Anne said.

‘Of course you can! You have a vigorous and original mind, Miss Peters, and contact with it has been a privilege. But you must not distract me from my confession -1 was telling you all my selfishness! I enjoyed talking to you, and I wanted very much to dance with you, but I knew – yes certainly, I knew! – that I should not. I allowed myself to be carried away by the moment, but I did not anticipate that it would have such serious consequences for you. If I had, I should certainly have behaved otherwise. I hope you believe that.’

‘Of course,’ she said, and they walked on in silence for a while. They crossed the place du Theatre and walked up the rue Richelieu.

‘Here is my house, mademoiselle,’ the Count said, halting in front of an old, narrow house with new white stone facings. ‘Here you will be quite safe. I share it with another member of the Embassy, Poliakov, and his wife and servants, so you need not be afraid to enter,’ he added delicately. ‘They will be as eager to help you as I am.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ Anne said, and allowed him to usher her in. An elderly manservant met them, and the Count, having introduced Anne in French, embarked in Russian on what she assumed must be an explanation of her plight. The manservant asked a question, and the Count turned to Anne.

‘May I ask where are your belongings?’ Anne gave the address of her lodgings. ‘Boris will send a man for them, to bring them here. It will be better, I think, if you do not go back for them. Inside this house, no one can harm you, but if you venture onto the street, I shall have less power to protect you. And now, I am sure you would like some refreshment.’ He led Anne into a parlour off the hall, and in a few moments the manservant brought cake and wine for them both.

‘Well, now,’ the Count said, standing by the fireplace and looking down at her, where she sat on the sofa, ‘having brought you so much trouble, I must somehow put things right.’ He pulled his chin. ‘It should not be too difficult, if we move immediately, to get you back to England, though it might be better to travel by way of–’

‘But I don’t want to go back to England,’ Anne protested.

‘Not want to go home?’ he asked in surprise. ‘Surely you cannot be serious?’

‘That was the greatest part of my reason for not going with the Murrays,’ she said. ‘It’s true that I left them in anger, but I had also come to realise that I love Paris, and I wanted to stay here.’

He looked worried. ‘Well, you cannot stay in Paris now.’

‘Yes, I understand that,’ she said wretchedly. ‘But what is there for me in England? I have no family, no home, no friends. All I can do is to try to find myself some work to keep me in food and lodging. The Murrays, I fear, will see to it that I cannot get another place as a governess; at least, not with the sort of family I would prefer. I should probably end up as a seamstress or a serving-woman, and if I must be disgraced, I had sooner be disgraced in a foreign country, where I am not known, than in England.’

‘This is too black a picture, surely,’ he said tentatively. ‘There must be something else you could do.’

She looked up at him with a sort of grim humour. ‘There is, but I would not contemplate it.’

He looked embarrassed, and walked across the room and back, twisting his hands behind him, and then paused in front of her gravely. ‘I have done you a greater wrong than I feared,’ he said. ‘I have ruined you, and made it impossible for you to go home. I cannot tell you how much I regret that foolish impulse of mine. If I could only have the time over again, and put things right–’

‘Please don’t!’ she said quickly. ‘I am not sorry. If I had the choice, I would dance with you again. It was my choice, you know – I could have stopped you, if I had tried hard enough. And,’ she added with a small smile, ‘I never really liked working for the Murrays.’

His eyes creased up in a smile and he held out his hand to her, and when she offered hers, he took it in both his and pressed it warmly. ‘You have all the famous courage of your race, mademoiselle! Well, I promise you you shall not suffer. Tell me, do you like to travel?’

She laughed. ‘I cannot say, sir. The only place I have ever been outside my own country is here.’

‘Would you like to see Russia?’

She stared at him, stunned. ‘Russia?’ she managed to say at last. ‘Can you mean it?’

‘Nothing could be simpler! My tour here is over, and 1 am to go home in the next day or two. I shall persuade Markov to give you a passport, and you shall come with me. You can travel as my niece. With a Russian passport, you will have no difficulty at the frontiers.’

‘The frontiers,’ she said, as through it were a magic word. She visualised their route northwards across Europe, through France and the German states, and Poland, and then to Russia! Mighty, mysterious, the most foreign of foreign lands – ‘But, sir, what should I do in Russia? How shall I live?’

‘Oh, I have thought of that,’ he said, smiling broadly. ‘Listen!’ And he sat down on the sofa beside her, looking, in his eagerness, more her age than his. ‘I have two daughters, one nine years old, and one just two. Now Yelena, the elder girl, has a German governess, dear old Fräulein Hoffnung, who taught my sisters when they were young, an excellent woman, though not widely educated as you are, Miss Peters. And Yelena is high-spirited and growing difficult to manage, too much for poor Fräulein Hoffnung, who ought by rights to be sitting by the fire and knitting, at her age. The little one, Natasha, was still with her nurses when I last saw her, but soon she will need the guidance and instruction of a proper governess.’

He jumped up again, and walked back to the fireplace, as if his thoughts were running so rapidly that only physical movement could relieve them. ‘Since I first met you, Miss Peters, I have greatly admired your intelligence, your education, your spirit and your character, and in fact it did once cross my mind that I should be very happy to be able to get someone to teach Yelena who had your abilities! Of course, the situation was very different then. I should not have thought of asking you to leave your safe employment and travel half-way across the world to a foreign country, but as matters stand now… Would you consider it? Would you come with me to Russia, and be governess to my daughters?’

Anne could not answer. The idea was too sudden and too dazzling. There was too much to think about. The Count watched her face sympathetically, and then said, ‘Of course, you cannot decide on an instant. It is a big step to take, and you will need time to consider. There will be questions you want to ask.’

‘It would be a great adventure,’ Anne said. It was the first thing that came to her tongue, and as she said it, she thought it sounded foolish, but the Count smiled approvingly.

‘I believe you have a taste for adventure. To go back to England would be tame. There is a wide world waiting to be explored.’

‘I hardly know, sir,’ Anne said hesitantly. ‘I think I may have something of my father’s nature. He joined the King’s service out of restlessness, I believe. I was brought up by him alone, and we were very close, and so I did a great many things that girls are not usually allowed to do. Adventure does not usually fall to the lot of females, but–’

‘Yes, you are like him. That is why you wanted to stay in Paris, rather than go back to England. Well, since you must now leave Paris, you must go forward, not back.’

She met his eyes, and hers had begun to shine with excitement. ‘You are right. It would be poor-spirited to be afraid. But shall I like it in Russia?’

‘Who can say?’ he shrugged. ‘But there is one thing you may be sure of – you will be treated as you should be, and not as the Murrays treated you. I have already told you on another occasion that we have the greatest respect for those to whom we entrust our children’s upbringing. You would not be regarded as a servant in Russia, Miss Peters, by anyone.’ He watched her face, waiting for her next question.

‘I don’t know any Russian. How should your children and I understand each other?’

He laughed. ‘In Russia we all speak many languages. Russian is the language of servants, and of the nursery, and for animals, and for the act of love. Adults speak mostly French to each other, although many older people prefer German, because it was the language of the Court while Tsarina Catherine ruled us – she being German by birth. For business we speak English, because all our merchants and bankers are English, and we read English novels, too. And we sing in Italian, of course. My children speak French and German fluently, Russian colloquially, and English sufficiently well – though I should like them to speak it better. So, you see, mademoiselle, I do not think you will have very much difficulty in making yourself understood.’

‘You mentioned a son earlier–?’ Anne said.

‘Sergei, yes. He is fourteen now, and away at school. I do not see as much of him as I would like. His grandmother likes to have him with her. He, of course, would not be in your charge. He and Lolya–’

‘Lolya?’

‘Yelena. We Russians are very fond of pet names,’ he smiled. ‘He and Lolya are the children of my first wife, who died many years ago. Natasha is my present wife’s first child.’

Anne was silent again, thinking of the step before her. If she went to Russia, probably she would never see England again. If she went, she would be dependent on the Count and his wife for their favour, for if they dismissed her, she would be really destitute, alone in a country incomparably more alien than France. If she were unhappy there, what chance would she have of remedying matters?

Yet what was the alternative? As the Count had said, she must go forward, not back; and what other opportunity would she ever be offered to travel so far and see so many new things? Her father’s spirit rose up in her strongly, and only her native English caution made her say, ‘Will she like me, your wife? Will the children like me? Do you really want me to teach them?’ He smiled broadly, as if he knew everything that had gone through her mind. ‘Yes, yes and yes. I was never more sure of anything, Miss Peters, than that this is the right thing for all of us. Will you come?’

She took a breath. ‘Yes, sir, I will come,’ she said.

‘Then we’ll drink a toast to it,’ he said triumphantly, filling her glass with such an impetuous hand that it lipped over and wet her fingers. ‘We’ll do it in Russian, for luck. Z.a vasha zdarovial! Your first lesson in Russian, Miss Peters! To your health!’

‘Za vasha zdarovia’ she said, and drank.

Later that day Anne met the Poliakovs, a pleasant couple perhaps ten years older than the Count. Poliakov himself was a short-necked, round, bald man, whose unremarkable face was betrayed by a pair of very sharp and humorous eyes. Madame Poliakov had a comfortable face and figure, wispy grey hair, and large, moist eyes, which grew ever more moist as she listened to the Count’s exposition of Anne’s plight, sympathising all through it in voluble German. The words ‘tragic’ and ‘orphan’ were uttered frequently with a wringing of hands, and when the story was told, she at once began offering various items of her wardrobe for Anne’s use, despite the fact that any one of her gowns would have fitted Anne twice over.

‘My dear Marya,’ the Count protested in amusement, ‘she is not destitute! She has a whole box of clothes of her own! And it will be high summer when we get back to Russia. There is nothing extra she will need until winter.’

But Madame could not be persuaded, and referred to Anne all evening in melting accents as ‘Das armes kleines madchen’, and continued to press gowns, shoes, pelisses, fichus and hairbrushes on her. The two gentlemen went off together to see the Ambassador about a passport, while Anne remained with Madame Poliakov, and when she managed at last to detach the kind lady’s mind from visions of destitution, discovered that she had some interesting stories to tell about the court of the great Catherine, where she had been a lady-in-waiting in her youth.

When the Count returned, he came into the room with a broad smile, and said, ‘Everything is settled. We leave tomorrow morning. The horses are ordered and the carriage will be here at eight. I have your passport, Miss Peters, made out in your new name. You are now officially my sister’s daughter, Anna. My older sister married a man called Davidov, whose first name was Peter, so with the addition of the patronymic, that makes your new name Anna Petrovna Davidova.’

Anne frowned in thought. ‘My surname, Peters, is a contraction of Peterson, you know. If you translated Anne Peters into Russian, presumably you would get–’

‘Anna Petrovna, yes,’ the count concluded with a satisfied grin. ‘A pleasant little coincidence, is it not? I knew you would see it!’

Chapter Five

In years afterwards, when Anne tried to remember that long journey through northern Europe to Russia, she found that the miles and days merged together in her mind, so that she could recall only broad impressions, and not a clear and accurate succession of detail. She began the journey eager to observe and remember everything, and for several hours at the beginning of each of the first few days, she sat well forward on the seat and craned out of the window, eyes wide and mind stretched for new impressions, aware that she might never have another opportunity like this.

But there was just too much of everything. In England, even a single day’s fast travelling would take one through many different sorts of landscape, with something new to see every mile. But on the continent, everything was so much larger, that the same sort of scenery would go on mile after mile for hours, perhaps even for a whole day. And then the sheer weariness of travelling overcame her. The roads at this time of year, though dusty, were not deeply rutted, and near large towns were often very good. But in the long spaces in between towns they travelled over roads that it was no one’s business to repair, and as they jolted and lurched along, every muscle was kept at the stretch all day to brace the body against the movement.

The Count, for his own reasons as well as for Anne’s safety, wanted to travel as fast as possible, so they stayed nowhere for more than a single night, and during the day they stopped only to change horses. They would enter the coach at eight in the morning, and travel until five or six in the evening, when they would descend stiffly at the chosen post-house to bathe, dine, and retire to bed. The unvarying routine soon produced in Anne a feeling of unreality, as though she were trapped in a repeating dream. Day after day they jolted along through flat fields and acres of young crops, through endless stretches of dark coniferous forest, through winding river-valleys where mild-eyed cattle grazed; past rolling green hills or distant mountains, past reedy marshes loud with birds, bare bog-heath, and silent, glassy lakes.

The days blurred into one another in her memory, until she felt that this was all she had ever done, and the names of the towns they passed through merged in her mind, so that she no longer knew with any certainty where they had been.

The early part of the journey produced one memorable incident. Having travelled through France, they crossed the Rhine by the bridge at Strasbourg and drove along beside the river to Karlsruhe, the capital of Baden. Here Count Kirov stopped and made a formal visit to the court to pay his respects to the Princess Amelie, who, he explained to Anne, was the mother of the present Empress Elisabeth of Russia.

The Princess received Anne with great kindness, and the Count most eagerly, taking him aside for a rapid conversation in German about the state of international affairs. She had with her a handsome, beak-nosed, auburn-haired man of about the Count’s age, who greeted Kirov with a broad smile and an embrace as an old friend. This was Louis-Antoine de Condé-Bourbon, known as the Due d’Enghien. He was the sole surviving grandson of the Prince de Condé, exiled from France and formerly known as an intriguer on behalf of the Bourbon family against the various Revolutionary governments of France. He now lived a life of bachelor retirement in the nearby palace of Ettenheim, and was a frequent visitor to the court at Karlsruhe.

He and Kirov had met in Italy some years earlier, when the Duc was serving with the army under the Russian general Suvorov, and Kirov was commanding a cavalry troop. As well as being very handsome, the Duc was high-spirited and charming, and Anne was not surprised to see he was a great favourite with the Princess, who often pinched his cheek or tapped his hand affectionately with her fan while laughing at the things he said.

When Kirov had passed on the news, the Princess pressed him to have dinner with her and the Duc, and to remain at the palace for a few days, courteously including Anne in the invitation. The idea of dining with royalty and staying in a palace was both dazzling and terrifying. Anne immediately began a mental review of her wardrobe, and did not know whether to be pleased or disappointed when the Count made his apologies, and said that he was anxious to press on with the journey. The Princess did not press him further, saying she knew what it was to be far away from those one loved. She entrusted him with letters for her daughter at St Petersburg, and bid him a kind farewell.

After Karlsruhe they travelled on through Wurzburg, Bayreuth and Freiberg to Dresden, which they reached ten days after leaving Paris. It was here that they heard the news that England had declared war on France by seizing two French merchant ships on the 18th of May, and had already sent a squadron to blockade Brest. Bonaparte had retaliated by ordering every European port closed to English shipping, and by arresting all English travellers in France – some said as many as ten thousand had been taken up. Part of Anne had never really believed that the Consul would do such a thing, and the reality of it brought home to her forcibly how much she owed the Count.

‘So it all begins again,’ the Count said to Anne that evening at the supper table in the posting inn, which stood at the end of the splendid, many-arched bridge which spanned the Elbe. ‘The privations and the killing and the suspicion – all the waste and madness of war.’

The innkeeper came in bringing a dish of veal cutlets accompanied by pickled red cabbage, strong-smelling sausage, and the inevitable round of stringy cold beef. He was very voluble on the subject of the war. The talk, he said, was that the First Consul had sworn he would conquer England and utterly destroy the faithless, treacherous islanders. Anne had been very quiet since he had gone out again. ‘You must not mind too much what that man says,’ the Count went on, eyeing her sympathetically. ‘It is a thing that is bound to be said.’

Anne looked up. ‘Yes, I know. Probably he exaggerates. And even if Bonaparte does have plans of that sort, he will never succeed while our navy patrols the Channel.’

‘You have a very proper faith in your father’s service,’ the Count said.

‘The last war proved the English navy invincible. I am not afraid of any threat of invasion.’ But the talk of war had reminded her how far from home she was, and how unlikely it was that she would ever see England again. She had chosen travel and adventure freely and gladly, but she could not repress a pang of sadness at the thought of the small green island that had bred her, of its soft skies and gentle hills and its courteous, independent people – her own people. The Count noted the brightness of her eyes, and took immediate remedial action.

‘You will have a glass of wine, Miss Peters – unwatered, I think,’ he said bracingly. ‘And then early to bed. We begin the harder part of our journey tomorrow.’

Anne obeyed him, grateful for his concern, and hugged that thought to her for comfort as she drifted off to sleep. As so often, she dreamed of travelling, jolting and twitching the miles away in her sleep.

After Dresden, her sense of unreality increased, and she lost all sense of time and distance. The roads grew steadily worse and the towns further apart; the accommodation more primitive, and the food more variable. At one inn she was shown to a room where the bed was jumping with fleas, and at another there were no sheets on the bed, only damp, musty-smelling blankets. But another, though simply furnished, was spotlessly clean, and the hostess, in starched cap and embroidered apron, brought them a delectable venison stew, fragrant with herbs, and a meltingly delicious cheesecake, freshly baked.

Their rate of travel decreased, and it took a week to reach Warsaw. Shortly after leaving Warsaw, the carriage went off the road into a rut almost deep enough to be called a ditch, and the resultant damage to wheels and axle caused their first serious delay, as they were obliged to stay for two days while repairs were carried out. They were too far from Warsaw to be able to use the time to explore the ancient city, and there was nothing whatever to see or do in the town where they were stranded. Anne took the opportunity to have some washing done while the Count read and slept. Then they took to the road again, passing through towns with increasingly unpronounceable names, some hardly bigger than villages, and through many areas of obvious poverty, where the fields seemed poor and stony, the cattle thin, and the peasant houses mean and dirty.

Four days later, they reached Grodno on the river Nieman, and when they had crossed the wooden bridge to the other side, the Count turned to Anne with a triumphant smile and said, ‘Now we are in Russia. Now we are home!’

‘And how long will it be before we reach your house?’ Anne asked, gazing around her in a rather dazed way, as if she expected to see the roof and chimneys appear on the horizon.

‘Another week, perhaps.’

Anne stared. ‘A week?’

‘A week or ten days,’ he said airily, enjoying the effect he was having. Then he grinned. ‘Russia is a large country,

Miss Peters. We have five hundred miles still to go, to reach Petersburg.’

Anne tried and failed to comprehend the distances involved. ‘In England it is impossible to be five hundred miles from home,’ she said with a rueful smile. ‘It takes a little adjustment of the imagination.’

Once again she looked out of the carriage windows with eager attention; and, whether or not it was her imagination, she seemed immediately to gain an impression of enormous space. The sky was an immense arc, deeply azure, with large clouds dazzlingly white above, bluish on their undersides; the horizon seemed to grow more distant with every mile; and the land stretched away all around as though it were actually uncurling as they moved towards it, like a cat waking from sleep. This part of Russia, she found, was mostly flat, with only gentle undulations, broken here and there by wooded ravines and numerous small streams. There were vast stretches of birch wood and pine forest, and between them lay the cultivated land, the spring seeds ripening fast under the hot summer sun. The roads were unmade, simply tracks of bare earth, and since the cultivated land was unfenced, they were very wide, where, in bad weather, travellers had moved further and further to the side to avoid the churning bog of the centre. The roads were dry and dusty now, but their width added to the impression of great space that was gradually filling Anne’s mind.

Space, and emptiness: they saw few other travellers, and, mile after mile, few other people of any sort. They might have been alone in the world. It was a strange sensation, rather unnerving at first, but exhilarating too, a heady sense of being unfettered and unobserved, of being free.

‘You must have felt so cramped in England,’ she said abruptly at one time, turning shining eyes on the Count. ‘Such small fields and narrow roads, and so many people!’

And he smiled sympathetically. ‘Yes, it’s true. I love to visit Europe – there is so much there, such riches! But I miss the prostor of Russia – the space. After a while, I feel as though I can’t stretch my limbs, as though I were in a cage; and then I know it’s time to go home.’

One evening they sat down to supper in the post-house in a town called Mzhinsk. They had been travelling for almost five weeks: French armies had already overrun Italy, captured Hanover, occupied the towns of Hamburg and Bremen, and closed off the Elbe and Weser trade routes, and Bonaparte was reputed to be building a thousand transport ships for the intended invasion of England. But for some time now, Anne had been able to think of nothing in the world so urgently as of getting out of the carriage and never getting back in it again.

They had finished eating when the Count said, ‘I have sent off a letter to Schwartzenturm, to warn them that we are coming, and telling them all about you. We will reach there tomorrow.’

Schwartzenturm was the name of the Count’s summer house near Kirishi, about twenty-five miles from Petersburg, where, as he had already told Anne, his family had been living while they waited for him to return.

‘Tomorrow!’ Anne said, and suddenly the thought that this journey was almost over was not as attractive as she had expected it to be.

‘Yes – one more day’s travel will bring us home. We may be rather late, but I intend to sleep in my own bed tomorrow night, whatever happens!’ He had been smiling, but now looked at her rather quizzically. ‘Is something the matter? You look troubled.’

‘No – nothing. I am very excited at the thought of seeing your house and meeting your family.’

‘They will make you welcome,’ he hazarded. ‘You cannot doubt it?’

‘Of course not,’ she said, managing a rather watery smile. ‘I am rather tired,’ she added, pushing back her chair, ‘and if we have a long day of travel tomorrow, I think perhaps I had better retire early.’

‘Of course,’ said the Count, rising courteously. ‘Good night, mademoiselle.’

‘Good night, sir,’ Anne said. She paused as she passed him, and looked up into eyes so full of sympathy, that she felt tears rising in hers, and was annoyed at her own weakness. The Count took her hands.

‘Don’t be afraid. Everyone will love you very much, Anna Petrovna,’ he said. ‘You must think of us as your family, now.’

Anne thanked him, withdrew her hands, and took flight before she was quite undone. Alone in her bedchamber, she tried to come to terms with the feelings that had been aroused by the news that the journey was almost over, and that her new life was to begin tomorrow. For nearly five weeks, she and the Count had been shut up in a small space together day after day, forced into close proximity, and with nothing to do but either talk to each other, or sit in silent thought. Like a plant in a greenhouse, intimacy was brought on rapidly and flourished in such conditions, and it was inevitable that Anne would emerge from the experience either loving the Count or loathing him, but at all events knowing him very well.

Their early approval of each other had proved to have been based on sound judgement. They both had a similar turn of mind, eager and enquiring, and a ready sense of humour; and while Anne had been well and thoroughly educated, the Count had a great deal more experience of life and the world. He enjoyed telling his adventures to one so appreciative, and she delighted in expanding her mind by all she learnt from him. She had listened with interest as he told her about his childhood and his early loss of his father, his time in cadet school, his army service, his first wife, whose marriage to him was arranged by his widowed mother, and his children; and even more eagerly when he talked of his experiences abroad. He had travelled extensively, both as a part of his Grand Tour, which had taken him to England as well as to France and Italy, and in the course of his services to the Tsar, both military and diplomatic – and, an intelligent and observant man, he had made the most of his opportunities. His expositions often provoked lively discussion between them, and Anne had enjoyed talking to him and being with him more than anyone since her father died.

But now, with the knowledge that tomorrow would bring them to his home, and him to the arms of his wife, Anne was forced to realise that the strong liking she had formed for him was different in a fundamental way from her love for her father. The Count was a vibrantly attractive man, and there had been times in the carriage when she had been intensely aware of his physical closeness. Once, towards the end of a long day, she had woken to the realisation that they had both dozed off, and that their heads were together, hers on his shoulder, his cheek resting against her hair. She remembered now, guiltily and with trepidation, how happy she had felt, and how she had continued to feign sleep so that, even when he woke and lifted his head, she had been able to remain resting against him.

She shook her head in a dazed way at the memory. Tomorrow she would meet the Count’s wife, her new mistress. He had told her a little about his second marriage. It had been a love-match: he had met Irina Pavlovna Kiriakova while he was on campaign, fighting the Turks in the wildlands of the Caucasian Mountains, the homeland of her family. They had fallen in love with each other almost at first sight, and he had brought her triumphantly back a bride at the end of the campaign. The Count spoke of his wife with great affection, talking freely of his longing to see her again, but he never offered any description of her. Anne could gain no impression of the Countess, except the inference that if the Count loved her, she must be a very remarkable and delightful woman.

But Anne did not long to meet her. Suddenly, at this late stage, she did not want the journey to end, did not want the Count’s attention taken from her and given over to all the other demands of life, and particularly to his wife. She stared out of the window at the black, moonless night, and gripped her hands together, and berated herself bitterly. Is there no end to your folly? Can you have allowed yourself to fall in love with this man, who can never be more to you than employer?

He is more, whispered her rebellious, inner self.

He has been kind to you, she replied fiercely. He likes you, yes, but only as he would like any intelligent, educated person. You like him for the same reason. Anything more that you feel is only gratitude for his having rescued you from Paris, and for having appreciated you where the Murrays did not.

Protest, from the inner self.

It must be so, she told herself firmly. You cannot live in this man’s house and teach his children, and harbour any secret feelings towards him. To do so would be not only wicked, but unspeakably foolish. Admire him, respect him, serve him: there is nothing else. His feelings are all for his wife. Have enough self-respect not to offer, even inwardly and secretly, what is not wanted, would never be wanted.

Suddenly her father’s face came clearly before her, looking at her with that expression of affection and pride that she remembered so longingly. I won’t let you down, Papa, she thought determinedly. The Count was Papa’s friend, and so she would think of him, always, always: her kind employer, and Papa’s genial friend. The inner voice retired, vanquished, and Anne prepared herself for bed calmly, almost serenely. You can do anything you want, Anne, if you set your mind to it, her father had said once, and she believed it. She believed firmly in the power of the intellect, even over the atavistic forces of nature.

‘Now we are on my land,’ the Count said, leaning forward to look out of the window, though since there was no moon, it was almost quite dark, and only the eyes of love could have discerned anything beyond the shapes of the nearest trees. ‘We should see the lights of the house soon. If it were daylight, you would get a fine view of it from this road. You must see it tomorrow, Miss Peters. It is quite remarkable – one of a kind,’ he added, laughing as if at some private joke.

‘Does it have a black tower?’ Anne asked, thinking of the name.

‘Oh yes. I shall show you everything tomorrow. A complete tour, just as if you were in England and visiting a great house, like Blenheim Palace. Yes, I did those things when I was there on my Grand Tour. I was the compleat traveller, I promise you! Ah, there are the lights at last!’

A few minutes later they turned off the road on to another track, and leaning forward, Anne could see the flaring lights of torches, and the shapes of people moving about near them. She sat back, and in the darkness of the carriage, put a nervous hand to her hair. She had dressed carefully that morning in her blue travelling-dress and her smartest hat, though the sensible part of her mind knew that in the excitement of such a homecoming, no one was likely to notice what she was wearing. Now there were men running along beside the carriage and voices shouting, and as they lurched to a halt, both doors were opened simultaneously and a babble of voices and laughter surged in. A round-faced man grinned up at Anne, letting down the step on her side of the carriage and holding out a hand like a plank of wood to help her down.

All was confusion for the next few minutes, a jumble of the ragged, yellow light of torches and slashes of shadow, the smell of pitch smoke and horses and sweat, laughter and Russian greetings, and people pressing forward to greet and exclaim. Then there was the Count, his long, cool fingers finding her hand, and drawing it firmly under his arm to guide her through the throng, into a dark doorway, up some chill and echoing stone steps, and into a large, brilliantly lit hall. Anne glanced around, gained the impression of rococo plasterwork and trompe-l’oeil Corinthian pillars, crystal chandeliers and enormous dark oil paintings in gilded frames, just like the hall of an English Great House. A large man in livery – the butler, surely? – was wringing the Count’s hand and actually weeping with pleasure, while various other domestics and a number of handsome, black and white dogs stood around and grinned their delight. Anne’s name was mentioned, and the butler bowed low and said something to her by way of welcome, and she smiled at him in a rather dazed way, and the Count began drawing her towards the door at the far end of the saloon.

And then the door opened, and a small figure came running towards them. Anne thought at first it was a child, for it was so small and thin: little feet in satin slippers flickered below the hem of a white muslin gown; little hands stretched forward from the sleeves of a vivid scarlet and gold silk Chinese jacket; a small face, pinched and eager, was surrounded by curls of soft hair the colour of clear honey. Surely it must be the count’s daughter, was Anne’s first thought.

But the little creature ran to his arms, the voice cried ‘Nikolasha! Eto ti?’ in a tone of such urgent love that Anne knew everything, even before the Count swept his wife off her feet, holding her in his arms well above the ground in a grip that must have hurt her, and saying in a voice made hoarse by emotion, ‘Irushka! Milyenkaya! Doushenka!’

Anne watched with a painful mixture of emotion, pleasure that one must always feel when witnessing real, unselfish love, and a pang of sadness that there was no one in the world who loved her like that. Then at last the Count restored his Countess to the floor, and taking her hand, turned her to face Anne, and said in French, ‘Irina Pavlovna, here is Miss Peters whom I told you of in my letter – Admiral Peters’ daughter, who has consented to be our little Lolya’s new governess. You must make her feel very welcome, for she is all alone in the world and far from home.’

The Countess looked up at Anne with a shy smile, and held out her slender hand. ‘Mademoiselle Peters, I am so happy to welcome you to Schwartzenturm. You must look upon it as your home, if you please.’ She turned towards a servant who had come in behind her, and took from him a tray, which she proffered to Anne. On it was a silver plate and a small silver dish, the former containing a little round, golden-brown cake, the latter a fine white powder Anne took to be pulverised sugar. Anne looked questioningly towards the Count.

‘It is an old Russian custom’, he explained genially, ‘to offer bread and salt to a person taking up residence in a new place; but nowadays, we often represent them with cake and sugar instead, as being more palatable. You must taste a little of the cake and a pinch of the sugar – that is your part in the ceremony.’

Anne did so. There was a murmur of approval and welcome, and the Countess smiled as she returned the tray to the servant and said, ‘You are completely among friends now, mademoiselle. I hope you will be happy.’

‘I’m sure I shall, madame,’ Anne replied. The Countess was beautiful, she observed, with that wistful quality of beauty which makes one feel almost sad. The wide Tartar cheekbones, the small, straight nose, and little pointed chin were the delicate setting for her beautiful amber-coloured eyes, fringed with feathery dark lashes, which shone with a soft and lovely light when she looked at her husband. Anne’s words were more than a formal politeness. The Countess’s expression was truly gentle and benign, shy as a wild animal is shy, but genuinely welcoming. It would be impossible, Anne thought, to do anything but love such a lovely creature, and she felt ashamed at the ambiguity of her thoughts the night before.

‘But you must be so tired,’ the Countess continued. ‘Come into the drawing-room; there is a supper laid out all ready for you, and tea.’

They passed through the end door into the staircase hall, where a great staircase wound ceremoniously round three sides, leading up to a gallery with a wrought-iron balustrade, and vistas through archways to vaulted corridors beyond. Anne caught a glimpse of something white crouched behind the balustrade, and thought it must be another dog, but almost instantly it jumped up and came running down the stairs, to reveal itself as a little girl in a white nightdress, with bare feet and curl papers in her dark hair.

‘Papa! You’re home! I knew it was you!’ she cried in French. ‘When it got late, Nyanka said you wouldn’t be home until the morning, but I made myself stay awake. I knew you’d come.’

Reaching the foot of the stairs, the child launched herself at her father, and the Count, laughing, caught her up and lodged her firmly on one hip, delivering himself of at least as many hearty kisses as he received, and addressed his daughter with a mixture of French and Russian endearments. Anne was delighted to see how unaffectedly they greeted each other. In England, amongst people of rank, even fond parents preserved formality with their children, and if, unthinkably, such a display of affection had been offered, they would have choked it off with stern rebukes about being out of bed without permission. But the Count put his daughter down only for the purpose of introducing her to Anne.

‘Now, Lolya, your best curtsey for mademoiselle, for I want you to make a good impression on her,’ he said in French, easing the bare toes down to the ground. ‘Miss Peters, may I present to you the Countess Yelena Nikolayevna Kirova?’

‘Enchantée, mademoiselle,’ the child said, making a deep curtsey with pointed foot and bent arm, in the manner of a ballet-dancer, and fluttering her eyelids like a coquette. Her parents laughed, and she jumped up, pleased, and cried, ‘Didn’t I do it well? Did you like it, mademoiselle? That is how La Karsevina does it at the ballet, when they throw her roses at the end of the performance. Mama took me last winter when we were in Petersburg, didn’t you, Mamochka? Do you like the ballet, mademoiselle?’

‘I’m afraid I’ve never seen it,’ Anne replied in French, ‘but I think I should like it very much.’

The child looked as though it were very strange for her not to have seen the ballet, and then said, ‘I mean to be a dancer when I grow up. And my cousin Kira is going to be an opera singer. We shall travel all over the world together, and have kings for our admirers.’

The Count laughed, and scooped her up onto his hip again. ‘So this is what happens when I go away for just a few months! When I last saw you, you said you were going to stay with me for ever and ever, and never get married, because you loved me best.’

‘But you were away so long,’ she objected, looking seriously into her father’s face, which was now on a level with hers. There was little resemblance between them, Anne thought, except for the rather long chin. The child was very dark, with black hair and eyes, and honey-brown skin, and her face had all the charm of irregularity, and of its innocent and animated expression. Over her father’s shoulder, she caught sight of Anne again, and with a little, considering frown, she whispered quite audibly into her father’s ear, ‘Papa, what must I call her? Is it Mademoiselle de Pierre?’

‘That is what it comes to, in French,’ her father agreed, laughing.

‘I think she is prettier than Fräulein Hoffnung,’ was the next penetrating comment, to the Countess’s evident embarrassment.

‘Please, come into the drawing-room, mademoiselle,’ she said quickly, and led her through the far door into a large, octagonal room.

‘Oh, this is lovely,’ Anne exclaimed involuntarily. The unusual shape was determined, she guessed, by the three-sided bay window, now covered by drapes of blue silk damask, directly opposite the door where she was standing. The floor was of polished parquet, the centre of which was covered by a huge Savonnerie rug in shades of blue and rose against a white background. The walls were dark blue, with an elaborate frieze of white and gold around the cornice, and the ceiling was again decorated with delicate rococo designs in plaster. The walls were hung with an enormous number of paintings, mostly portraits, jostling each other for space in a friendly way, and there were several large, comfortable sofas, a handsome pianoforte near the window, and in the centre of the room, a wide circular table, on which stood a samovar emitting wisps of steam, and a number of supper dishes. The sight was most welcome to Anne, who was beginning to feel almost faint from hunger.

‘It is a pretty room, isn’t it?’ the Countess said, looking round with a pleased smile. ‘You will like it even more by daylight – the colours show up much better. But now, I am sure you must be tired and hungry. Let me take your pelisse and hat – there, now. Come and sit here and be comfortable, and Lolya and I shall wait on you. No, I insist!’

In the most natural, unaffected way, the Countess took off Anne’s hat with her own hands, and placed Anne on the most comfortable of the sofas, and went over to the table to make the tea. Russian tea was something that Anne had already come across on her journey from Grodno, and she had gathered that it was something of an institution in Russian society. It was drunk from glasses, instead of cups, which were arranged on the table with a measure of the thick, amber liquid already in them. Boiling water was then added from the samovar, and sugar stirred in, although at some of the inns, instead of powdered sugar being added to the tea, she had been given a piece of sugar snipped off the loaf to chew while she drank, which was the peasant way.

The child Lolya, despite her nightgown, curl papers and bare feet, was behaving in a completely drawing-room manner, and brought tea to Anne and then to her father as though to the manner born. Anne sipped gratefully at the hot liquid, while Lolya placed a little table with a marquetry top just before her, and the Countess brought her a plate of cold chicken, cake, nuts and dried figs. Anne tasted the chicken first. It had been roasted with honey and herbs, and was the most delicious chicken she had ever tasted; and she said so.

‘Kerim roasted it specially, when he knew you were coming,’ the Countess said, with a laughing glance at her husband. ‘He believes that the cooks in London are the best in the world, so whenever we have guests who have been to England, he insists on doing something special for them. You can imagine how excited he was at the thought of a real Englishwoman coming to stay!’

‘I won him from Prince Naryshkin in a wager, years ago when we were both young and foolish,’ the Count added. ‘The next day the Prince offered me fifteen hundred roubles to have him back, but I wouldn’t take it. I’d already tasted some of Kerim’s cooking, you see. He learned his art from a Frenchman in Moscow, which makes it all the more odd that he believes the culinary art is only understood in London.’

‘I believe London society may know all there is to know about eating fine food,’ Anne offered, and they laughed.

‘You must try one of the cakes, Miss Peters,’ the Count said later. ‘They are curd-cakes, a speciality of the Caucasus, where Irina comes from. She had to teach Kerim how to make them – didn’t you, Irushka? I think he begins to make them almost as well as you.’

Anne tried one and found it delicious: a soft brown crust around the outside, and moist, sweet curds and fat Turkish raisins inside. Lolya, who was sitting in the corner of her father’s sofa with her legs tucked up under her, was given one and ate it with the passionate slowness of one who knew from experience she would not be offered another. By the time the last crumb had gone, her eyes were heavy, and she made little protest at being sent off to bed again. Looking at her made Anne feel sleepy too, and she was glad when the Countess, with quick sympathy, suggested that Anne must want to go to her room, and offered to show her there at once.

‘And tomorrow, I will show you the house,’ the Count promised. ‘Good night, Miss Peters. Sweet dreams attend you – stationary ones, I hope.’

The Countess conducted Anne up the stairs and showed her into her bedroom. It was a decent-sized, square room dominated by the large bed with a white counterpane and curtains, towards which Anne gazed longingly. The only other thing she noticed immediately was the icon in one corner. It had a small red lamp with a pierced shade burning before it, throwing lacy patterns of shadow on to the ceiling.

‘Saint Anne,’ the Countess said, noting the direction of Anne’s gaze. ‘I thought you would like to have your own saint to look after you, but if there is another you’d prefer– ?’

‘You are most kind, madame,’ Anne said a little blankly. She had been brought up with an English contempt for idolatry and hatred of Popery, but this was obviously meant kindly. It was an example of her new mistress’s great thoughtfulness, not an attempt to convert her, and she must respond to it as such. She forced herself to add in a warmer voice, ‘It was thoughtful of you. I am content with your choice.’

The Countess indicated the wash-stand. ‘There is hot water there, ready for you. I think you should sleep as late as you need to tomorrow. I will tell them not to wake you, but wait until you ring. Good night, Miss Peters. I hope you will be happy here.’

‘Good night, madame, and thank you for everything,’ Anne said. When the Countess had withdrawn, Anne thought to herself that it would be her own fault entirely if she were not happy in a place where the mistress was at such pains to make her comfortable. She washed and cleaned her teeth, changed into her nightgown, which some unseen hand had unpacked and laid out for her, and then knelt by the bed to offer a prayer of thanks and of mild supplication, that everything would go on being as pleasant as it had begun.

Then she climbed up into the high, white bed. It was a feather bed, and she sank into it deeply, feeling the absolute weariness of five weeks on the road washing over her. Her head whirled rather pleasantly, with mingling images of light and shade, carriages and chandeliers, trees and samovars. Her limbs were heavy, the bed was soft, so soft… as soft as the curds in the curd-cake… she was sinking gently into a bed of curds… she was asleep.

Anne woke suddenly and completely, and didn’t know where she was. White curtains with sunlight streaming through them. White curtains? Oh, she must be at an inn somewhere – but where? Where had they got to last night? Recollection seeped back into her brain. No, of course, they had arrived. She was at Schwartzenturm, the Count’s house, in what was to be from now on her own room. That was a pleasant thought: a room of her own again, after so long – a room to unpack in. She sat up and pulled back the bed curtains, and then leaned back against her pillows to examine the room in comfort.

The room was square and the proportions good, but there was no sign of the elaborate elegance of the other rooms she had seen last night. The floor was of wood, painted dark red, with no rug but a sheepskin beside the bed on to which to lower tender morning toes. The walls were of plain plaster, painted white, except for a band at the top where they met the ceiling, which had been painted with a frieze of red poppies, intertwined with green stems and leaves, and yellow ears of corn. It was a scheme of decoration which struck her as simple, novel, and attractive.

The furniture was simple too. There was a handsome, tall chest of drawers made of some light, polished wood – cedar, she guessed – for her clothes, and a heavily-carved, low oak chest, like a church terrier, which she thought would do to hold her shoes and hats. In the corner by the door was the icon with its lamp on a small table before it, and near the window a pretty console table, probably English, with a large mirror above it, in a frame of painted wood. Below the window was a day bed covered in red-and-white-striped silk, which looked French, and on the other side of the room a heavy tapestry chair which looked Dutch.

Add the pleasantness of the sunlight pouring in through the white muslin curtains, the smell of beeswax, and the starch of the white counterpane, and it was a room plain and simple, but eminently comfortable. And on the table beside the bed, alongside the candle, someone – she guessed the Countess – had placed a nicely bound book of French essays, and a small vase of wild wallflowers, whose faint but sweet scent reached her like a breath of kindness. It was a room in which to be happy, to feel at home, she thought drowsily from the comfort of her pillows.

She must have drifted back to sleep, for she woke abruptly to the feeling that she was being watched, and sat up with a startled gasp to see that the door of her room was open a crack, and an eye was peering at her through the space. It withdrew hastily as she moved, and then reappeared, and, judging by its height from the ground, Anne guessed it must belong to the Count’s younger child.

‘Hello,’ she said. Then, remembering to speak French, she continued, ‘It’s all right, you can come in if you want. I’m quite awake now.’ The door opened a fraction more to allow access to the round soft button of a nose and part of a chin. ‘Why don’t you come and climb up on to the bed,’ she invited, ‘and we can introduce ourselves.’

There was a pause while the proposition was evaluated. Then the door opened fully and a small, stocky, nightgowned figure scampered in and scrambled up on to the bed, to kneel before her and contemplate her unsmilingly but with interest from under a tumble of light-brown curls. The solemn eyes were amber, like her mother’s, but otherwise it was as yet a chubbily undefined face.

‘Do you know who I am?’ Anne asked after a moment. The child nodded, but did not speak. ‘How did you know I was here?’ she asked next. No answer. ‘Did your sister tell you?’ A nod. ‘So now I know who you are, don’t I? You must be’ – she paused to get the full name right – ‘you must be Natasha Nikolayevna. Am I right?’

Another nod, and then a radiant grin, accompanied by a violent rocking back and forth to indicate approval and good will.

‘Well, Natasha Nikolayevna,’ Anne went on, ‘I am very glad to meet you, and I hope we shall be friends.’ Natasha tucked her lower lip under her upper one, and rocked a little harder. ‘What lessons do you do? Do you take lessons with your sister?’ No answer. ‘Do you take lessons with Fräulein Hoffnung?’ The bright eyes continued to regard her, but in silence, and Anne was beginning to feel baffled, when there was a small sound at the door of her room and Yelena appeared, dressed, this time, in white muslin frock and blue sash, her black curls tied up with blue ribbon.

‘Natasha! There you are!’ she cried in aggrieved tones. ‘You shouldn’t be in here, you wicked thing. Nyanka has been looking everywhere for you. You are to go and be dressed at once!’

Natasha gave Anne one more bright, silent look, and jumped off the bed and pattered out, avoiding with a dextrous swerve the admonitory pinch her sister aimed at her as she passed. Yelena, dropping Anne a curtsey of apology, began to close the door, but Anne called her back.

‘Please ask your nurse not to be angry with her, just this once. She was not troubling me,’ Anne said. ‘I was glad to make her acquaintance; but I could not get her to talk to me. Does she understand French?’

Yelena came a step further into the room. ‘Oh, she understands it, but she won’t speak it,’ she said.

‘Won’t speak it? Why not?’

‘She never speaks at all,’ Yelena said matter-of-factly. ‘Not to anyone. There isn’t anything wrong with her – she just won’t. Nyanka calls her Nemetzka – little dumb thing – but Mama says she’ll speak when she has something to say.’ She looked around the room, evidently having lost interest in the subject of her younger sister. ‘Mama said you weren’t to be disturbed, but since you are awake, are you going to get up, mademoiselle?’ she asked wistfully. ‘Because I want to show you the nursery, and my rocking horse, and Zilka has a litter of puppies in the stable.’

Anne smiled, remembering the urgency of childhood. ‘1 shall get up this instant,’ she promised. ‘With the whole of the house to see, I couldn’t bear to stay in bed a moment longer.’

Chapter Six

On going downstairs, Anne was directed by the butler into the breakfast room, to the right of the octagon room. It was a smaller, square room, very pretty with its walls hung with green silk damask, its decorated ceiling picked out in pink and green, and its row of long windows reaching down to the ground draped with gently blowing white muslin. Here, she learned, the family took their informal meals. There was a large, ‘state’ dining-room on the other side of the octagon room for formal occasions.

The Count and Countess were at breakfast, and both children were sitting and eating with them – another thing Anne had never witnessed in England, where children took all their meals in the nursery. As she entered, the Countess looked up with a smile and said, ‘Oh, Miss Peters, you are up so early! This naughty child of mine woke you – I am so sorry.’

‘No, indeed, madame, I was already awake,’ Anne said hastily. ‘Please don’t scold her.’

The Count, who had risen to his feet, reached across and ruffled Natasha’s curls, and she spared him one golden look from her bowl and spoon. ‘Nevertheless, she must understand that she is not to enter your room again without permission – do you hear me, Nasha?’

‘You call her Nasha?’ Anne enquired as she took the seat a footman was holding out for her.

‘It is a little of a joke,’ the Countess said, with a smile at her husband. ‘In Russian, nasha means ours.’

‘Because I am really only Papa’s,’ Yelena said unconcernedly. ‘My real mother died when I was a baby.’ It was said without any malice, but Anne, glancing at the Countess, saw the serenity of her expression falter just for an instant. From what she had so far observed, the Countess treated Yelena like her own child, and indeed she had heard Yelena call the Countess Mamochka, which was surely a term of endearment. Yet perhaps there was some element of friction between them. It was something to keep in mind as she got to know her new pupil.

For now, she merely said, ‘I see,’ and accepted cutlets and coddled eggs from the footman, grateful that breakfast seemed to be much the same wherever one went in Europe: she preferred dietary experiment to come later in the day, when she felt strong enough to cope with it. There was fragrant coffee, too, and crusty bread, a little darker in colour than English bread, with a denser texture and a delicious, nutty flavour. The children were drinking raspberry juice, and eating curds and pieces of honeycomb.

‘Well, now that you have been woken early,’ the Count said, ‘we must see that the day is put to good use. If you will allow me, Miss Peters, I shall give myself the pleasure of showing you the house and grounds, or as much of them as we can see in one day. Tomorrow, I’m afraid, I must go to Petersburg.’

The Countess gave a little involuntary cry, and then put down her fork and said, ‘Oh, Nikolai, no! So soon?’

‘My dear, I must. But I shall not stay long. I must make my report to the minister and deliver some letters, and then I shall return. After so long away, I think I may be sure of having this summer to myself, at least.’

When they had finished breakfast, the Countess suggested that her husband should show Anne the outside of the house first, and then join her and the children on the terrace later. ‘It will not amuse them to talk of architecture, and I must speak to Vasky and Kerim on domestic matters. You will enjoy it much more on your own. Miss Peters is bound to be a better audience than I, who have heard all the history before.’

The Count pretended hurt. ‘You are bored with my conversation already! Very well, Miss Peters, you and I will go alone and appreciate the architectural marvels of my house. You will find it a novel experience, I promise you!’

Schwartzenturm was certainly an odd-looking house. Seen from the road, the west front had a solidly Palladian central block, three storeys high. The white stone facade was dominated by a central recessed portico, its four massive Ionic columns thrown into sharp relief by the dark, shadowy space of the loggia behind them. ‘Delightful on hot afternoons!’ the Count commented. The columns rose to a perfectly normal entablature and pediment, above and behind which the sloping roof and chimneys peeped coyly.

To either side of the central block were one-storey screen walls, linking it to two pavilions. So far, all was perfectly conventional. But the south pavilion, beginning at ground level as a small echo of its parent block, from the first floor upwards degenerated rapidly into a Rhine schloss, complete with round turrets topped with elaborate wrought-iron decorations. It was as if the original architect had been abruptly dismissed, and hastily replaced by someone homesick for the Black Forest.

The north pavilion did not even begin right. From the ground upwards, it was a round, black stone tower, like a castle keep: massive, plain, and mediaeval, as if hewn from the living rock on which it stood. In a remote and gloomy Scottish glen, it would not have looked out of place, but rising from the meek clay of flat grazing-land, it had a most peculiar effect. ‘This, of course, is the black tower which gives the house its name,’ said the Count.

The curtain walls concealed two courtyards and the necessary jumble of stables, kennels and outbuildings, as could be seen from the other side of the house. It could also be seen that the back of the central block did not match the front, being faced entirely in soft red brick, with plain Queen Anne windows. The three-sided bay of the octagon room, and the French windows of the breakfast room, gave on to a broad terrace with a stone balustrade and a straight drop down to the park, so that the house appeared to be only two storeys high. If the west front had been designed by an Italian classicist, and the pavilions by nostalgic and romantic Germans, then the east front had evidently flowed from the pencil of a homesick Englishman.

‘Palladian palace, Rhineland schloss, Scottish bastion and English country house – who could have put such things together?’ Anne asked, laughing, as she and the Count finished their circuit.

‘The main block was designed by an Italian architect, Gatto, about eighty years ago. It’s actually based on one of Palladio’s villas, the Villa Emo at Fanzolo,’ the Count told her. ‘Soloviev had the estate then, and wanted a summer house close to Petersburg, and commissioned Gatto to build him one. But he died before it was finished, and Prince Chernosov bought it for his wife, who was German by birth – one of the Empress’s ladies-in-waiting – and added the white tower for her, so that she wouldn’t feel homesick.’

‘And the black tower?’

‘The old Princess, the Prince’s mother, added that. She lived here with the Prince and his wife, but after her son died, she grew very strange and gradually retreated from the world. The young Princess only came here in the summer, preferring – despite the white tower! – a modern house in Petersburg, but the old Princess still felt her privacy wasn’t complete enough. So she had the black tower built with her own money, and went and lived in the top of it all alone, seeing no one but the servant who brought her food. She never left her room again until the day she died.’

‘Like a prisoner in a fairy tale,’ Anne said, looking quizzically at the Count, hardly knowing whether to believe him or not. He regarded her seriously, divining her thought.

‘Oh, but it is perfectly true, I promise you. There are much stranger stories than that in this great land of ours! Well, after that, the young Princess sold it to the Razumovskys, who tore down the east front, which used to house the ballroom, and rebuilt it with the octagon room and the terrace as it is now because they had spent a very happy year in England on their honeymoon tour and wanted to be reminded of it. It’s based on a house called Kirby Hall, in your Yorkshire, and they had English bricks brought over specially to make it look as like the real thing as possible.’

Anne burst out laughing. ‘Now I know you are teasing me! You must tell me the real story, if you please.’

‘I am perfectly serious,’ he smiled. ‘Why should you doubt it?’

‘But surely this is your family home?’ Anne said. ‘Your father and grandfather must have lived here before you; but by this account, it has had four owners in eighty years.’

The Count shook his head, turning her towards the terrace steps. ‘It’s not like that in Russia. Until very recently, all the land belonged to the Tsar, and even the richest of the noblemen only held their estates on sufferance. They could be, and were, transferred from one appointment to another, from one part of Russia to another, be deprived of their estate or awarded a new one, all at a moment’s notice; so they had no roots in one place, as your old English families have.’

‘And might they not refuse?’ Anne asked.

‘The Tsar had absolute power. Everything in Russia, every stick and stone, every man, woman, child and beast, belonged to him, to do with what he liked.’

‘That seems very strange. Did no one – a rich provincial lord, for instance – ever try to challenge the power?’

The Count smiled rather grimly. ‘Emperors have been murdered before now. But all power flows from the imperial throne, reward as well as punishment, and we Russians are born to the system. It’s in our blood. And it would be impossible in any case for any provincial lord, as you say, to raise the army necessary for rebellion. There is a very old law which says that a man holding any position of authority over an area may not hold land in that area.’

‘I begin to understand,’ Anne said. ‘A rigid system, but strong.’

‘I suppose things may change in the future,’ he went on, ‘but it’s only since the charter of 1785 that we have been allowed to own land as our legal property – a mere eighteen years, far too short a time to change the habit of centuries.’

‘So you feel no particular attachment to this house?’ Anne reverted to the original point, and sounded so disappointed that the Count laughed.

‘To the pomestie – the estate – none at all, but only a man devoid of humour could feel nothing for a house as eccentric as this! But I dare say I shall sell it in a few years’ time, and buy another pomestie somewhere else,’ he added cheerfully. ‘We Russians have restless feet – we do not like to stay in the same place for very long together.’

‘It is very different from the English way,’ Anne said thoughtfully as they mounted to the terrace. ‘There every man making his fortune longs to buy a piece of land, and to build a house, to plant and improve, and hand them down to his sons and sons’ sons. But I suppose if you have never been able to own the land, it would be different.’

‘And the land here in the northern territories is so poor it is not worth improving. In the north, it runs in the blood to take a crop or two and then move on.’

‘Very poor husbandry, sir,’ Anne said sternly. ‘What happens when you run out of land?’

‘We go out and conquer the next country, of course,’ the Count said with a smile. ‘Why do you think Russia is so big, Miss Peters?’

The Countess and the children were waiting for them on the terrace. ‘Is he talking nonsense, Miss Peters?’ she asked with a smile. ‘He has a very strange liking for confusing and confounding people. Now you must meet Fräulein Hoffnung, whom Nikolai has told you about, I’m sure.’

Anne stepped forward to shake the hand of a thin, elderly woman, whose face was drawn and pinched with long endured pain. But the eyes were kind, and the handshake cordial, and she said to Anne in strangely accented French, ‘Ah, mademoiselle, I am very glad to meet you. My little Lolya will be in good hands, I am sure, and I hope she will be a good girl and do my teaching credit.’

‘I’m sure she will,’ said Anne. The Countess now drew her attention to the stout person who was holding Natasha by the hand.

‘And this is Nyanka, the children’s nurse, who was my nurse, too, when I was little. Nyanka, this is the Barishnya Peters.’

Nyanka was a fat, comfortable-shaped woman, dressed all in black with a white apron, and a kerchief tied about her head. It was difficult to tell her age: she might have been forty or sixty. Her face was brown and wide, the weathered skin shiny across the cheekbones like a rock worn smooth by time. She had a strong, eagle’s beak of a nose, and bright black eyes under surprisingly fine eyebrows. Anne thought she must have been very attractive in her youth, perhaps even beautiful, with that mixture of power and delicacy.

Around her neck Nyanka wore a series of crucifixes in graduating sizes – a large wooden one on a leather thong, an elaborately carved one made of mother-of-pearl, and a small, very beautiful one of blue enamel on a silver chain – together with a copper medal of St Nicholas, and a phial made from a small animal’s horn, held in a filigree case, which Anne learned later was supposed to contain the blood of one of the obscure Georgian saints she venerated. Anne thought there was something unexpectedly similar about her and little Natasha, standing beside her holding her hand, in the way both of them watched her gravely and silently with bright, almost feral eyes.

‘I think, my dear,’ said the Countess to her husband, ‘that you had better show Miss Peters something of the estate before it grows too hot. The house can wait for another time.’

‘Whatever you say, my love,’ the Count agreed. ‘Shall I order the barouche, and then we can all go together?’

‘Oh yes please, Papa,’ Yelena said passionately. ‘And may I ride on the box with Morkin, please? Because he promised he would teach me how to drive, and he keeps forgetting, and if I am there he can’t, can he?’

Half an hour later the barouche drew up outside the house, and Yelena urged Anne to come and meet the two large white horses which were harnessed to it. ‘They are called Castor and Pollux, after the stars, you know,’ she told her importantly. ‘They are my great friends, and I always bring them sugar. Nyanka keeps her tea-sugar for me to give to them.’

The horses were pure white, with pink muzzles and ruby eyes, and thick, pale eyelashes, and their topknots had been tied up with blue ribbons which fell forward over their eyes. They bent their heads eagerly to Yelena’s hands, and blew and nuzzled exploringly for the fragments of sugar in her small palms. The coachman, Morkin, stood by their heads, watching with a proud smile that revealed a lone yellow tooth like a standing stone in his lower jaw. He wore a tall beaver hat, like an English coachman, decorated with a favour of blue ribbon to match his horses, but below that he was all Russian, in a peasant tunic and trousers, and soft boots which made his ankles turn over. He said something to the Count, evidently about Yelena, who smiled at him happily under the horses’ whiskered muzzles.

‘Morkin is very proud of Yelena,’ the Count translated to Anne. ‘She has never had any fear of horses, and he often tells the story of the time when she first learnt to walk, and escaped her nursemaid and wandered into the stables. Morkin found her in one of the stalls, holding herself up by the leg of one of my hunters, quite unafraid. The horse had the reputation of being a kicker, but he never offered the slightest harm to Yelena.’ Yelena now, having had her gloves forcibly put on by Nyanka, climbed with Morkin’s help up on to the box, while the Countess, with a foolish little flowered hat and a white lace parasol against the sun, took her place inside the barouche with Natasha on her lap. The Count helped Anne in beside her, and took the pull-down seat for himself.

‘By the way, Miss Peters,’ he said as they started off, ‘it has never happened to come up in conversation, but do you ride?’

‘Yes sir – my father taught me,’ Anne said. ‘I like riding very much.’

‘Good,’ he said. ‘Irina likes to ride, and it makes it more pleasant for her if she has a companion when I am away.’

‘Oh yes,’ said the Countess. ‘I shall be able to show you something of the countryside, too. There are lots of places too far off to walk, where one cannot take a carriage.’

‘I have no habit, madame,’ Anne mentioned.

‘Oh, but you can make yourself one, I’m sure. Nikolai says you are very skilled with the needle.’

‘I’ll bring back the cloth from Petersburg,’ the Count said. ‘You shall tell me what colour you like.’

‘You are too kind, sir,’ Anne began, remembering by contrast how Lady Murray had bid her make over one of her old dresses for the Embassy Ball; but the Count only looked surprised.

‘Nonsense. You must have a habit if you are to ride. Ah, look, you can see the church now. I always think it looks prettiest glimpsed through the trees like that.’

The church stood on the main road, which went to the right to Petersburg and left to Kirishi, opposite the beginning of the track leading down to the house, where, in England, there would have been wrought-iron park gates. It was a little white church with a blue cupola, and small, narrow windows. To the left of the door was an arched recess in the wall in which was painted a Byzantine virgin in a dark red robe against a sky-blue background, her head ringed with stars.

‘We go to mass here every Sunday and on Feast days,’ the Countess said. ‘We have no chapel in the house, and I prefer the mass in a small church like this rather than in one of the fashionable churches in Kirishi. It is simpler and more sincere, I think. I suppose, Miss Peters,’ she added with a faintly anxious accent, ‘that you are a Protestant?’

‘Fräulein Hoffnung is a Lutheran,’ the Count said briefly, ‘which is rather trying for her.’

For whom – the Fräulein or the Countess? Anne wondered. ‘I was brought up in the Church of England,’ she said as neutrally as possible. It was too early as yet to judge how far the quantity and quality of their alien religion would affect her relationship with the Kirovs. Possibly the Fräulein would be able to enlighten her on that.

The coachman had halted the carriage in the feathery shade of a stand of three false acacias, their trunks white with summer dust, and the Countess now asked in that same, faintly anxious voice, ‘Would you like to see the church, Miss Peters? It has some fine icons.’

‘Yes, very much,’ Anne said firmly, and was rewarded with a relieved smile. They all got down, and stepped out of the bright sunshine and into the cool darkness of the interior. It seemed very empty to Anne, who was used to English churches full of pews or chairs. The floor was of black and white marble, whose chill struck through the thin soles of her sandals, laid in a chequerboard pattern with the points reaching away to the closed altar-screen gates. They were of black wrought-iron, tipped with gold, and elaborately designed, like the gates of a palace. Beyond them, the sanctuary lamp gleamed faintly red.

The air was full of the dry, lilac odour of incense – a strange smell, like dead beauty, Anne thought, like a butterfly or a flower, pressed in a collection, only the sad, dried husk of its living self. After the bright light outside, it seemed dark in the church. Under the cupola, a lustre like an iron cartwheel on a long chain bore a petrified forest of virgin candles, ready for the next service. Around the walls, there was the muted glimmer of small lamps, each flickering flame faintly reflected in the gold of its icon. Near the door, there was an ancient silver font, the engraving worn almost smooth by generations of ardent hands. Against the wall on one side was a narrow wooden chest, and on the other a painted board, almost like an inn sign, depicting the Crucifixion. There was a wide, scarlet wound in the pierced side, and the long dark face was wrenched in a very human agony. The board was supported by a wooden pole on a heavy base, and on the top of the pole was a sinister skull of Adam, glaring sightlessly up into the shadows of the roof.

Anne had been prepared to feel disapproval of the idolatry, or merely an indifferent interest in the architecture, but as she wandered slowly down the church looking at the icons, she found herself unexpectedly moved. The emptiness, the space around her (what was it the Count called it? Prostor! Did everything in Russia give that feeling?); the faint smell of incense; the absolute simplicity of the place allied with the passionate beauty of the dark Byzantine madonnas cradling their infants’ heads, and the intensity of suffering in the faces of the saints; and the dim, glimmering gold and the dark vivid colours all combined to give her a strange feeling of exaltation, which she did not understand, and was not sure she entirely approved of, yet which she did not want to lose. Stepping out into the sunshine and normality, she experienced a sense of loss.

Behind the church, there was a small churchyard, bounded by a low, white-paling fence, and grouped around it to form a square, there were a number of buildings with which Anne was to become very familiar. To one side of the square were the priest’s and deacon’s houses – plain, wooden buildings roofed with wooden shingles – the living quarters being reached by an external wooden staircase, for the ground floor of each was used for storage and for keeping animals.

On the opposite side was another similar structure, slightly larger, occupied by the steward of the estate and his wife and children. To the side of it, a road led away, Anne was told, to the peasant village, and to a large house like a sort of barracks, where the estate workers lived. Next to the steward’s house was a smaller one, divided into two sets of living quarters, one upstairs and one downstairs. Below, Anne was told, the estate painter lived. She imagined at first that they meant he was the man responsible for painting the fences and barns, but when she ventured on the idea, the Count laughed.

‘No, no, I mean painter as in portrait painter! There are plenty of examples of his work around the house. Irina will show them to you. I am lucky in him – he is very good, but he has never been to Petersburg, so he doesn’t know it. If anyone ever discovers how good he is, he will be quite spoiled, and I shall lose him, as sure as fate. Naryshkin would like to have him – his painter can’t even get the eyes on the same level! Grigorovitch has painted Irina several times, and the children, and all my favourite horses. You must sit for him now you are here, Miss Peters.’

‘I, sir?’ Anne said, startled. The Count smiled genially.

‘Yes – why not? The children will be glad in years to come to have your likeness, and Grigorovitch might as well have something to do to keep him occupied.’

Anne had never had her likeness taken, except by other girls at school, for practice in sketching, and the idea intrigued and rather embarrassed her. She wondered if the Count were saying it to tease her, but then she could not think why he should, and dismissed the idea. If he really wanted the children to have her portrait, she would not object. In her blue dress, perhaps…

Upstairs from the painter lived an old woman whom the Countess had brought with her from her home in the Caucasus, and since Yelena clamoured to be allowed to visit her, the Countess took Anne up to meet her too. Yelena ran ahead up the steps calling, ‘Marya Petrovna! Marya Petrovna! It’s me!’ and Anne and the Countess followed holding Natasha’s hand, while the Count walked off to speak to his steward.

‘She is a wonderful needlewoman,’ the Countess explained. ‘She makes a good many of my clothes and all my underwear, and she embroiders exquisitely. She made Natasha’s christening- robe, and she’s the dearest creature, and loves the children like her own. Well, you see how Lolya likes her.’

The room into which Anne ducked was spotlessly clean and very bare, with the floorboards painted a lovely amber-yellow, and an icon of the Holy Mother opposite the door, with a pretty silver lamp before it. There was a narrow bed, covered in a white cotton counterpane embroidered with white flowers, a window-seat under the single window, a cupboard against the wall, and a tall-backed, wooden chair in which the occupant sat. She was an old woman, tiny and shrunken, but her skin and eyes were clear, and her fingers were moving nimbly about the work in her lap. The thing that struck Anne as most immediately peculiar about the room was that there was a basket on the floor by the old woman’s feet in which a small black pig was lying, curled up like a cat.

When the Countess came in, the old woman’s face lit up. She held out her hand, and when the Countess took it, the old woman kissed the Countess’s hand and pressed it to her forehead in a gesture of mingled love and homage. There was a rapid exchange in Russian, and then the Countess said to Anne, ‘Marya Petrovna greets you and apologises that she cannot get up, but she no longer has much use in her legs. She bids you regard this house as your own.’

The old woman watched closely as the translation was made, and when Anne looked at her and smiled, she bowed her head several times rapidly. Then she reached out hands for the children, who allowed their hair to be stroked and their cheeks patted. Yelena spoke to her in Russian, while Natasha sat on the floor to caress the pig, which woke up and grunted in a genial way and stuck up its wet and quivering snout to sniff at Natasha’s face.

‘Does the pig live in here all the time?’ Anne asked in amazement.

‘Oh yes,’ the Countess said. ‘Marya Petrovna always has a pig. She gets them as piglets and keeps them by her, and feeds them from her own plate. She says it’s the only way she can manage, because of her legs. Then, when they get too big, she has them butchered, and lives off the meat for quite a time. She cries dreadfully when they are killed because she gets so fond of them.’

‘But don’t they -1 mean, doesn’t it–’

‘Oh no, they are very clean. She trains them as you or I would train a dog. She says they are more intelligent than dogs–’

The old woman spoke, chuckling.

‘She says they are more intelligent than most people, too,’ the Countess translated with a smile.

‘Does she speak French, then?’ Anne asked.

‘She understands it a little, but doesn’t speak it very much.’

Yelena had now been despatched to the cupboard in the corner, and returning with a wooden box, hung over the old woman’s arm while she opened it. It contained sugar-plums, which the Countess said she prepared herself, and for which she was famous. Natasha and Yelena received one each, and were soon reduced to silence by the sheer size of them. There was some more conversation in Russian between the Countess and her sewing-woman, and though Anne could not understand the words, there was no mistaking the affection and concern which existed between the two. Then the children both kissed the old woman, she kissed the Countess’s hand again, bowed to Anne, and they went out into the sunshine.

‘She’s a remarkable woman,’ the Countess said as they descended the stairs. ‘She does everything for herself, despite her disabilities, and the children love visiting her, not only for the sugar-plums, but because she is so interested in everything. I’m sure Lolya could talk to her for a day at a time.’

‘Mademoiselle, did you know’, Yelena said, turning an urgent face upwards as she preceded them down the steps, ‘that Marya Petrovna has tame hens, too? She lets them out in the morning to scratch about in the yard, and they come up into her house at night to be fed and to sleep. They sit along the window-seat, and lay their eggs for her. When we went there once, one of them had a family in the pig’s basket – six little chickens. You never saw anything so small! And she let me hold them.’

‘I can see the attraction that house must hold for them,’ Anne murmured to the Countess.

‘It’s one of the places they like to go on their morning walk,’ the Countess replied. ‘Poor Fräulein Hoffnung is allergic to animals, but Lolya manages to persuade her to go there at least three times a week. So you are warned, Miss Peters!’ Beyond the square of houses behind the church was another square made by the range of farm buildings. Here there was the dairy, where the cows were milked and several different kinds of cheese made, and the stables where the working horses were kept. The stable block was a handsome building, with decorative door frames, and a carved frieze around the walls just under the roof. The roof projected a long way out beyond the walls, and between the roof buttresses under the eaves, swallows had nested. The air was filled with their shrill sweeting as they dashed busily in and out, feeding their families. The wooden roof shingles were painted bright red, and for that reason this stable was called the red stable, to distinguish it from the stable up at the house where the riding and driving horses were kept. Yelena was obviously quite at home here. She seemed to know all the horses, and even the long-horned white oxen, who shared the stables, by name, and would have spent all day there petting them and talking to them had not the Count come to find them.

‘We had better drive on, or you will see nothing of the estate, Miss Peters. No, no, galubchik,’ he smiled at Yelena’s protest, ‘the stables are close enough to walk to. You can bring mademoiselle another time, and introduce her to all the horses.’

Back in the carriage, they drove on down the road in the Kirishi direction, and after a while turned off on to another track to the left, and drove through the parkland belonging to the house. There were cattle grazing, clumps of well-chosen, ornamental trees, gentle undulations of land, pretty streams, and rustic bridges; just like an English park, except that there was a great deal more of it.

‘The Razumovskys were responsible for landscaping the park,’ the Count told Anne. ‘It was all part of their admiration for the English country houses they visited on their honeymoon tour. They had mature trees brought here, some from thousands of miles away, to get the right effect.’

Further on they turned off on to another track, and drove past the estate granary, which stood beside a stream, and was screened by a stand of larch and pine. Beside it was the Count’s distillery where vodka was made. Much of this was sold to the peasants under licence, issued by the government, at the village kabaks.

‘Not very much like your English village inns, though,’ the Count said to Anne. ‘They are really just drinking-shops, very bare and functional, no food or accommodation provided. The peasants drink vodka when they have the money. When they don’t, they make their own drink called kvass.’

‘And what is that made of?’ Anne asked.

The Count grinned. ‘Much better not to ask! It gets them drunk just the same, and I’m afraid that’s all they care about. There’s no sitting about, sipping and conversing for them. They like to drink a lot very quickly, until they fall into a stupor – they call it zapoi, and it’s the peasant’s idea of heaven on earth.’

‘You don’t do them justice, Nikolasha,’ the Countess reproved gently. ‘They make lovely music, too, and sing and dance, and there’s a kind of mumming they do at Easter–’

‘Yes, dousha, I know,’ the Count said soothingly. ‘I didn’t suggest that drinking was all they did – only that when they drink, they do it single-mindedly, and to excess.’

‘You will give Miss Peters the wrong idea,’ the Countess pursued. ‘I’m sure our serfs here are very hard-working, good sort of people. And some of the women do lovely embroidery.’

‘Yes, Irushka maya, I know. I think there’s just time to drive as far as the sawmill,’ he said, changing the subject firmly, ‘and then we can come back past the paddocks and the orchards and the kitchen garden. When you have time, you must show Miss Peters the greenhouses. We haven’t much in the way of ornamental garden, Miss Peters. The change of climate from heat to cold is too rapid here and too extreme to grow many flowering plants out of doors, so we have to rely on greenhouses. There were only two when we first came here. The Razumovskys used them simply to grow potted plants to decorate the house for formal occasions. But I have greatly extended them, added an orangery, and built a whole new range of succession houses, and I mean to do still more in that direction when I have the leisure. I would like to be able to have fruit and vegetables sent in to Petersburg for most of the year. I think you will find them well worth looking at. I got many of my ideas in England. Your gardeners understand such things better than anyone in the world.’

Except the Russians, Anne added inside her head, anticipating his thought. He caught her eye and laughed as if he had heard it.

The Count left early the next morning, and Anne experienced the first day out of his company for a very long time. She felt strangely hollow and listless, which she attributed to the aftereffects of the long journey. She was glad that the Countess said there was no question of her beginning her duties at once.

‘You must settle in first and find your way about,’ she said. ‘And besides, I promised Nikolai to show you the rest of the house.’

Over the next few days, sometimes with the Countess as guide, and sometimes alone, Anne explored the vast, rambling house. The main formal rooms were those she had already seen: the hall, staircase hall, and octagon room, which together were intended to form a triumphant progression in the grand manner of the previous century – the ‘circuit’ – beginning at the main entrance and culminating in the ‘state’ dining-room. This lay to the left of the octagon, and Anne had only glimpsed it in semidarkness, for its shutters were kept closed, and its furniture and lustre bagged in hollands.

To either side of the great hall were four smaller, more intimate rooms, a library, a business-room for the Count, and two sitting-rooms, which the Countess used for privacy, or on dark or cold days when they were more cosy than the octagon room. All the rooms were covered with pictures, struggling for space, frame to frame, and Anne spent many an amusing hour looking at them. They were a motley collection. Some were works by well-known painters – Rubens, Rembrandt, Van Dyck – others by lesser-known Italian artists, endless views of Venice by Pittoni and Tiepolo, and allegorical scenes by Panini and Bonavia; Alexander and the Gordian Knot, Mars and Venus, Rebecca at the Well, the Death of Lucretia.

But by far the most numerous were portraits, some of famous people by eminent court painters, others family portraits by artists unknown. Anne found several of the Countess by the same hand, presumably Grigorovitch, and others of her as a younger woman, by a much less skilled hand. The children were represented, and the Count appeared eight times by artists of graduating skill, from quite good to appallingly inept. There were also portraits of dogs, dozens of horses, and various interiors and views of the outside of the house in a variety of styles. It was an amusing mixture of the priceless and the worthless, and Anne contemplated with interest the mind which could have chosen to display them all side by side.

Upstairs in the central block were four ‘state’ bedrooms, which all led off the gallery in the staircase hall, and a range of smaller bedrooms used by the family. The nursery occupied one whole side of the house, and here the children and Nyanka and her assistant Tanya slept and played. There was a small room designated as the schoolroom, which Anne would use, and Fräulein Hoffnung also had a private sitting-room where she could retire to keep her stern Lutheran Sundays. But unlike an English household, the children were not confined to the nursery. Instead, they had the run of the whole house, and though startled by the idea at first, Anne soon came to feel that it gave the house a more comfortable and genial atmosphere.

The white tower, she discovered, was occupied mostly by the servants, of whom the upper ones had their own rooms there. Other rooms were empty, others again used for storage. There was a great deal to store – furniture, porcelain, carpets, pictures, the expensive, extensive magpie collection of the travelled Russian nobleman. There was a great deal of Italian statuary of various periods, and most of the furniture and carpets seemed to be French – the spoils of the Revolution, Anne supposed. The treasure was heaped, disregarded, in room after room in the narrow circular towers. She wondered if even the Count knew what he had.

The black tower was empty, and unused even for storage. Anne liked to go there alone for there was something intriguing about its stark emptiness. For most of its height it contained no rooms, only a stone staircase which wound round an empty central core, lit by unglazed, arrow-slit windows through which the air blew freshly. At the top of the stairs a solid oak door opened into a large empty chamber, half-moon shaped, occupying half of the tower. Three doors in the straight wall led to a staircase up on to the leads, and into two smaller segments of rooms, in one of which the mad old Princess had immured herself. Oddly, Anne found no atmosphere of gloom up here. The view from the windows at the top of the tower was breathtaking, and she could imagine the self-confined prisoner spending all her days gazing outwards, rather than inwards at her own sadness. On fine days, Anne liked to climb up on to the leads and just sit there in the blessed sunshine, feeling the gentle air brushing her face, and watching the cloud shadows move across the green meadows, the acres of ripening crops, and the distant darkness of the forest.

Yelena was not interested in accompanying Anne and her mother on formal tours of the house, but when it came to the kennels and stables, she could not have been kept away. The stables up at the house were called the ‘white’ stables, to distinguish them from the red, and here the riding and driving horses were kept. Castor and Pollux, Anne was told, were always at her command for taking out the children in one of the light carriages. There was also a team of bays for the berlin, and a very round dun pony called Limonchik – ‘Little Lemon’ – who pulled a little park calèche which seated two. The Count’s hunters were still out at grass, but there were half a dozen road horses, three of whom were broken to side-saddle, two mouse-grey Tibetan ponies, and the Countess’s own chestnut mare, Iskra.

In the kennels were a variety of hunting dogs: English mastiffs, and a flock of elegant, black-and-white borzois, including the Count’s favourite, Zilka, who was nursing a litter, of which, Yelena told Anne ecstatically, her father had promised her one of her own.

As well as getting to know the house and the servants and beginning to learn a little Russian – she fully intended to be able to speak it properly within a year – Anne was learning more of those on whom her future happiness depended. Yelena, she soon saw, had got out of hand, perhaps through the growing indisposition of Fräulein Hoffnung, or perhaps simply because the Russians seemed to have a very haphazard way of bringing up their children, and spoiled them dreadfully, allowing them all sorts of liberties that wouldn’t have been dreamed of in England.

Yelena was a lively child, intelligent, though Anne thought not at all well taught, and good-natured as long as she had her own way. But she lacked concentration, disliked anything that required prolonged effort or hard work; and though as yet there had been no confrontation between her and Anne – for lessons had not formally begun – Anne had no doubt from the gleam in those dark eyes that there would be something of a battle before she settled down to disciplined ways.

Natasha would not be under her tutelage for another two years yet, but Anne observed her with interest. She had thought Yelena was exaggerating when she said Natasha never spoke, but it was quite true – she not only never spoke, but never made any sound at all. The Countess said that she had cried lustily when she was born, and as a baby had made all the normal gurgling noises until she learned to walk. Then her self-imposed silence began. The Countess, at Fräulein Hoffnung’s instigation, had her examined by doctors in Petersburg last winter, but they had said that there was nothing functionally wrong with the child, and she certainly seemed perfectly normal in every other way. Nyanka said that she would speak when she was ready, and the Countess agreed. Anne was surprised at her apparent unconcern, but it seemed to be genuine.

Natasha appeared to be happy and healthy: she played with her toys, listened to stories, pattered about after Nyanka or Yelena, and shared her sister’s affinity for animals; but Anne thought her a strange little thing, and sometimes felt disturbed by that bright, watchful gaze of hers. It was too knowing for a little child, almost as though she were laughing inwardly at the adults she cared too little about to wish to communicate.

But if there was something odd about Natasha, there was also something odd about her mother. Anne saw a good deal of the Countess during that first fortnight when the Count was away: she ate all her meals with her, sat with her in the evenings, was shown around the house and taken for drives by her, and yet though they conversed in a far more friendly and informal manner than had been the case with Lady Murray, she could not feel she came any closer to the Countess than on the first day.

There was no apparent reserve: the Countess was uniformly kind and considerate, her manner gentle, her expression kindly. Yet Anne felt that she was dealing with a mask, a shape thrust forward to distract attention, not so much to present a false image, but to prevent an image from being detected. If there were a reality, it was deeply hidden, and sometimes when she spoke to her, and found herself regarded with that golden gaze, like the long, blank stare of a leopard, Anne wondered if there were anything underneath it at all.

She was not alone in finding the Countess strange, Anne discovered. During the two weeks, there were several courtesy calls paid by neighbouring families, and Anne was presented to the visitors, and greeted by them, in a warm, friendly manner that was balm to her Murray-bruised self-esteem. The Russian ladies came with their grown-up daughters and small sons and sat in the octagon room, drinking tea and chatting. They asked Anne about England and Paris and her adventures, asked after the Count rather wistfully, listened patiently to Yelena, begged Anne to play for them on the pianoforte, and praised her extravagantly when she obliged.

But she could feel their unease and noted the sidelong way they looked at the Countess, heard the unnatural note in their voices as they chatted to her, and the relief with which they turned to each other or to Anne. They were pleasant, ordinary matrons, concerned with their houses and husbands and children, with meals and domestics and fashions and marriages; probably they had too little imagination between them to know why, but the Countess Kirova made them feel uneasy.

Anne could see why the Count would have married her, why he loved her. She was beautiful in a remarkable and unique way, the sort of woman to intrigue a man, to make him want to possess her, as he might wish to own a rare and precious work of art. But she was also alien, and Anne wondered how genuine a love could be for something so utterly impenetrable, and how much it was a self-delusion, a fantasy. Anne remembered how he had spoken to her and looked at her, how close their minds had become during the five weeks of their journey to Russia, and she could not believe that he ever spoke to his Countess like that. Surely real love must be for like to like?

Anne remembered the soft glow of the Countess’s eyes when she looked at her husband, his passionate greeting of her when he first arrived home, and faltered; but then she remembered also that exchange in the carriage about the serfs, when the Countess had failed to grasp what her husband was saying, and had revealed a shallowness of understanding which a man of his intellect must find daunting. The Count might love his Irina as he would love a beautiful animal, but surely he could not love her mind? In bed at night, alone with her thoughts, Anne felt that he could not, that his singling-out of her in Paris had been in response to a real need in himself; and she looked forward to his return from Petersburg with a guilty eagerness.

Chapter Seven

A rainy day meant there was no going out for a morning walk or drive. The children had already driven Nyanka to slapping-point, and Fräulein Hoffnung had a cold in the head, so in response to Yelena’s urgings, Anne took her and Natasha down to the kitchen to make sweets.

The kitchens were on the ground floor under the white tower, a range of rooms connected by stone corridors, around a central chamber ruled over by Kerim. He was a short man, barrel-chested and slightly bow-legged, with a swarthy face, black oiled hair which hung about his neck in love-locks, and protuberant black eyes that shone as though they had been polished, and ran easily over into tears. Despite his Turkish appearance, he spoke French perfectly and with a French accent, and he took an instant liking to Anne the first time she was taken downstairs by the Countess to meet him.

‘Ah, how well you speak French, chère mademoiselle, like a Frenchwoman! How good it is to hear after the butcherings these Russians make of it! We must converse often – such a pleasure! Come to my kitchen any time.’

Anne knew enough about bad-tempered, autocratic English cooks to accept this as a compliment. Kerim was remarkably good-humoured, and never seemed to mind having his territory invaded by the children, whom he greeted each time as though he had not seen them for weeks, with hugs, damp kisses, and large sighs.

‘The darling little ones,’ he would say moistly, ‘how I love them! Fair as angels, so sweet, so gentle! Ah, mademoiselle, if only things had been different!’

‘What things, Kerim?’ Anne asked, intrigued.

Kerim shook his head lugubriously. ‘My life has been full of tragedy! If I were to tell you… But then, I would not break your heart, as mine has been broken.’

‘But Kerim, what tragedy? What has happened to you?’ Anne would ask every time.

And every time, Kerim would only say mysteriously, ‘We are not all made the same, mademoiselle. The good Lord knows why.’

Kerim, though Russian born of Turkish stock, was a Roman Catholic, which scandalised Nyanka, who thought Papists were servants of the Devil, corrupters of the true Faith, and astonishingly, intriguingly evil. It particularly fascinated her that, compared to her practice, Kerim crossed himself backwards, and when she visited with the children, she would try to provoke him into doing it so that she could watch. If that failed, she would use more direct methods, and usually finish by trying to persuade him to convert to the Orthodox faith.

‘The faith of your fathers, Kerim!’ she would say beguilingly. ‘It’s in your blood – surely you must feel it! Tradition, reverence, the old ways! Let me get Father Grigori to come to you tomorrow and talk to you.’

Kerim bore it all in silence, until Nyanka was driven through frustration to begin tugging at his sleeve; and then, more often than not, a childish slapping-match would break out, and they would finish by throwing handfuls of flour at each other, Kerim proving himself thereby far more Russian than French.

‘Why did you become a Roman Catholic?’ Anne asked him once.

‘To honour Monsieur Bertin, my teacher,’ Kerim said. ‘No man could cook like that, unless the Grace of God were in him. What was good enough for my Master was good enough for me.’

With the Count away, and no entertainments in the offing, things were quiet in the kitchen, and Kerim was only too glad to set aside what he was doing and spend the morning making sweets. He enveloped the children in white aprons, tying the tapes with his own hands; set them on stools so that they could see; and made a batch of lemon drops – hard, almost transparent sweets made from boiled sugar-water flavoured with lemon juice. Fräulein Hoffnung was particularly addicted to lemon drops. Anne had discovered that her long-suffered pain was partly bad teeth, and partly severe digestive troubles, the one perhaps being connected with the other.

The sugar-boiling was too dangerous, in Kerim’s view, for the children to do more than watch, but he allowed them to help make other things, like ‘green roses’, a Crimean sweet made of marzipan, and ‘mountain’, a sticky white confection which he said was a Turkish delicacy. They made sugar-plums, too, and candied almonds, which were set aside in a cool store for the dessert course of dinner. They finished by making a particular Russian favourite called marmelad, a sort of fruit jelly, pink or white with a hardish outside and a soft, almost liquid centre, which Anne could see one could easily grow too fond of.

They were happily occupied about these pleasant tasks, and Kerim was telling Anne about his early days in Moscow when he had cooked for the English Club in Arbat Square, and had just embarked on some more eye-rolling and hints about his tragedy when Nyanka came rushing in, greatly excited, to say that the master had arrived home, and began at once tweaking at the children’s apron strings and patting at their hair.

Anne’s heart gave a violent lurch of excitement and happiness, which shocked her, and she spent an unnecessary minute or two straightening Yelena’s dress to give herself time to bring her thoughts back under control, while Yelena, frantic to run upstairs to see Papa, struggled like a bird under her hands. When Anne mounted the steps at last, she did so calmly and with a tranquil smile of welcome already prepared for her lips; but it was of no use. The Count was in the great hall, still in his driving-coat of white drab, while a smiling Vasky held his hat and gloves; the Countess stood beside him, her hands clasping and unclasping before her, and Yelena was bouncing up and down on the spot in order to release some of the intolerable pressure of excitement. As Anne appeared at the door, with Nyanka and Natasha behind her, the Count turned and looked at her with such a friendly, glad smile, that all her resolve melted like spring snow in the sun, and she could only smile back at him, with all her heart in her face.

‘Miss Peters, there you are! How good it is to see you! Have you taken good care of everything while I was away? And there’s my little Nemetzka! Come and kiss me, doushenkal Yelena Nikolayevna, you’ve grown two inches! Haven’t you a kiss for me?’ With Natasha in his arms, Yelena tugging at his elbow, and the Countess standing very close to him as though he gave out warmth like a fire, he moved towards the drawing-room, talking about Petersburg and his journey. Anne, well pleased with her share of the greeting, followed with the footman carrying his cloak bag.

‘Petersburg was very hot and amazingly crowded. I don’t know what everyone was doing there, when they ought to have been at their dachas, but it made it more pleasant for me, when I was not occupied at the court or with the minister,’ the Count said, shedding his daughters and his coat and sitting down on the long sofa. ‘The Kovalskis were there, and Uncle Petya Basarov, and the Poliakovs, just arrived and on their way to the country. They asked after you, Miss Peters, and I gave them a good report of your health and happiness. I hope I was right?’

Anne could only nod, still a little bemused at her happiness in seeing him again.

‘Did you see the Empress?’ the Countess asked.

‘No, she was indisposed again, poor creature, but the letter from her mother will do her good. The family was at Orianenbaum, of course. I saw the Emperor and the Empress Dowager. They were eager to hear all about my visit to Karlsruhe – not that there was much to tell, but d’Enghien is a great favourite with them both.’

‘And what did they say about the war with England?’

‘The Tsar didn’t say anything much about it. Of course, he is thoroughly disillusioned with Bonaparte, ever since he had himself made Consul-for-life, and he has always had a passionate admiration for everything English.’

Anne was intrigued. ‘I didn’t know that your Emperor–’ she began.

‘Oh yes,’ the Count nodded. ‘I think in his heart he would rather like to see a parliamentary system like yours in Russia – though with the power balanced a little more in favour of the throne. Certainly there are many senior ministers around him who would like us to move in that direction, and Alexander knows that the administrative apparatus is desperately in need of reshaping. He is not an autocrat by nature. He was brought up by his grandmother, the great Catherine, and she had liberal principles. She even flirted with republicanism at one time, until the revolution in France disenchanted her. She had Alexander educated the same way – he read Rousseau in his youth, you know,’ he added with a smile at Anne.

‘But Russia could never be a republic, Nikolai,’ the Countess said, frowning.

‘Of course not, Irushka – no one suggested it,’ the Count said patiently. ‘Everything that has happened in France has tended to make the Tsar and his ministers see the dangers involved in too much reform; yet something must be done to revise our governmental system. So they turn more and more away from France and towards England.’

‘Then, do you think that Russia will enter the war on England’s side?’ Anne asked tentatively.

‘It depends very much on what Bonaparte does next. The war is not Russia’s war, as yet, and God knows we can’t afford to get involved. But the Tsar is still young for his age, and idealistic, and if anything should happen to provoke him… The decision, you see, would be entirely his. However, for the moment at least, we shall remain neutral. And now, from politics to more important matters! I am home again, and ready to be amused. We must have a dinner, Irushka, and show Miss Peters what Schwartzenturm looks like en grande tenue. I should like to ask the Poliakovs, and who else? The Tchaikovskys are in the country, are they not?’

‘Yes, and the Tiranovs.’

‘And how would it be if we asked Shoora and Vsevka to come and stay?’

‘Oh yes, Papa!’ Yelena said at once. ‘And Kira and Vanya too!’

‘Of course, doushka,’ the Count said, and then, to Anne, ‘My younger sister, Alexandra, and her husband, who live in Moscow. They have two children, a son Ivan, and the daughter Kira, who is Lolya’s great friend.’

‘Yes, she mentioned her the day I arrived,’ Anne said. ‘The one who is going to be an opera singer.’

‘That’s right,’ the Count laughed. ‘Kira always seems to have some unsuitable ambition. We’ve always taken it in turn to visit each other but I’ve been away so much lately, I expect we’ve got out of sequence. Vsevka’s family – the Danilovs – are the great family of armament makers. Vsevka inherited a big factory in Tula, about a hundred miles from Moscow, and another in Kiev. He’ll be one person who does hope Russia will go to war with France!’

Yelena had been eyeing the cloak-bag all this time, and making a very noble attempt to possess her soul in patience, but now her restraint snapped, and she pressed her father’s arm and said, ‘Did you bring me a present, Papa? You always bring me something from Petersburg.’

‘Yes, I did, little Avarice. I brought presents for everyone, and you shall have yours right away. Oh, by the way, Miss Peters, I brought you some very nice barathea for your riding habit. Vasky will send it up to your room. I hope you like the colour – here is a sample of it.’

He brought out of his bag a small sample square and gave it to her. It was a very dark red, between wine and terracotta, which Anne saw at once would suit her perfectly. She felt warm with gratitude, not only for the kindness, but for the personal quality of it, which made it doubly valuable.

‘It’s perfect,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to thank you, sir!’

‘Then don’t,’ he said genially. ‘As I said before, you must have something to ride in. It’s English cloth, by the way. Isn’t that appropriate?’

‘I have the pattern upstairs which was used for my habit,’ the Countess said in her soft voice. ‘I’m sure you will be able to adapt it for yourself. If you do the cutting-out yourself, we can have Marya Petrovna make it up for you.’

‘You are most kind, madame,’ Anne said, and sat stroking the sample square with thoughtful fingers as she watched Yelena and Natasha attack the presents the Count was bringing out for them from his apparently bottomless bag.

The following day dawned fine, and the whole family went on a picnic. They took the barouche, with Castor and Pollux to draw it, and the caliche with Limonchik between the shafts.

‘Bring your sketching-book,’ the Count advised Anne cheerfully. ‘We are going to the waterfall, our favourite picnic place, and you’ll find it well worth the effort of putting pencil to paper.’

It was quite a caravan which set off. The Count drove the barouche himself with Yelena on the box beside him, anxious to take the reins whenever he would relinquish them to her, and Fräulein Hoffnung, Nyanka, and Natasha inside. The Countess drove Anne in the caliche, and promised to teach her to drive by the time they reached the picnic place.

‘It is really very easy,’ she said, ‘and Limonchik knows his business so well, anyone could drive him.’

Third in the procession came a kibitka driven by Morkin, containing the food hampers, plates and glasses and knives and forks, rugs to sit on, a table with folding legs from which to serve the food, four servants to attend them, food for them, and all the other things such as parasols, shawls, books, towels and a balalaika, which anyone was likely to need.

They drove in the direction of the wooded high ground that Anne had seen from the terrace, but which was too far away for her to have visited yet. As they came nearer, she could see that it was an outcrop, sloping and turfed in some places, but with bare, sheer faces like low cliffs in others. Various shrubs and trees grew on the slopes, and at the top, where it became a plateau, the woodland began. It was not very high, not more than about fifty feet at its highest, but in the predominantly level land all around, it stood out.

The waterfall they were aiming for was where a small stream tumbled about twenty feet down one of the sheer faces, making a pool at the bottom before it again became a stream, running down eventually to join the wider stream on which the granary and distillery were built. By the pool itself there was a broad, grassy lawn of close turf, and a scattering of birch, hazel and alder which gradually thickened into denser, darker woods beyond.

‘It’s a pretty place, isn’t it?’ said the Countess as Anne, who had taken over the reins, drew the caliche to a halt behind the barouche. ‘There are lovely orchids at this time of year, and wild clematis, and in the spring, primroses – you never saw so many–’

‘And don’t forget the zemlyanika,’ said the Count, coming to hand his wife down. ‘Wild strawberries, Miss Peters. Tiny and scented, and they make the best jam of all. Aren’t you glad I made you bring your pencils?’

‘Yes, very,’ Anne said, accepting his hand in her turn.

Yelena was bursting with energy, and wanted to show Anne everything, and insisted that she must see the waterfall from above as well as from below. There was a rough path leading up the broken slope to the side of the waterfall, and Anne regarded it doubtfully, for it looked as though it would be something of a scramble. Yelena might do it easily on all fours, but that would be rather beyond a grown woman’s dignity.

‘Oh you must come, you must!’ Yelena cried passionately. ‘Everyone has to see it from the top. Papa, tell her she must.’

The Count, seeing the problem, said genially, ‘I think you might attempt it, Miss Peters, with a little help. There are only two difficult places, and if I were to go first, I could pull you up.’

Anne glanced at the Countess, who said placidly, ‘Do go, if you wish. I am quite content just to sit here.’

‘We’ll wave to you from the top, Mamochka,’ Yelena promised generously, taking it as settled. She scampered off, and Anne and the Count followed more soberly.

‘It is wonderful to see the freedom of movement children have today,’ the Count remarked, watching his daughter with an indulgent smile. ‘When my sisters were Lolya’s age, they wore stiff brocade gowns, with boned bodices and hoops in the skirts. They couldn’t have climbed up that hill, even if they had been allowed to. But now, with just a muslin gown and thin petticoats… ’

‘Yes,’ said Anne. ‘Even in my own childhood, I remember grown-up ladies wearing panniers and false rumps. It surprises me to think how much they managed to do, with such handicaps. Even getting into a carriage must have been a struggle.’

The path was easy enough, with the Count’s strong hand to pull her upwards and steady her, and they were soon at the top.

‘There, look, you can see the house. It looks very English from here, doesn’t it? And over there, in the trees, you can just see a chimney – no there! Do you see it now? That’s the distillery.’

‘And how far does your estate go?’ Anne asked, looking out over the plain.

‘As far as the eye can see – that is what one should answer to such a question, isn’t it, Anna Petrovna?’ the Count teased. ‘Do you know,’ he added musingly, ‘the thing that has always troubled me about the devil tempting Our Lord on the high place, was that he could not have offered Him all the kingdoms of the earth, unless they were his to give.’

‘Deep thoughts, sir,’ she said, amused, and turned her head to look at him. He was close beside her, and she had to tilt her head upwards to see his face. He was smiling that closed-mouthed, enigmatic smile she had come to know so well. He had left off his hat, and the breeze ruffled the ends of his silken hair which lay across his forehead. A cloud shadow followed the breeze, and the sun, coming after, lay across his smooth tan skin like butter. His green-gold eyes looked directly into hers, as if there were no distance between them. Everything seemed to Anne to pause a moment, and it was as if in that moment she received through all her senses a complete and exact knowledge of him, of everything he was, the essential core of him – perhaps his soul. She was alive to him, dangerously, sensitively, and she felt that he was aware of her in the same way.

It was a perilous instant, lasting only a breath of time, leaving her heart racing too fast, as Yelena broke the bubble by demanding, ‘Why did you call her that, Papa? Why did you call her Anna Petrovna?’

The Count turned his head away, and Anne felt as though his gaze had had to be ripped away from her. ‘That’s what Miss Peters’ name is in Russian, galubchik. You can work that out for yourself.’

‘But she isn’t Russian,’ Yelena objected with the passionate logic of the child. ‘So why do you call her a Russian name?’

He moved from Anne’s side, and she felt her skin grow cold with his absence. ‘If she is going to live in Russia from now on, she will become a Russian, or nearly so. Why, have you some objection?’

‘I think it’s silly,’ Yelena said firmly.

‘Do you, indeed?’ the Count demanded, reaching out hands to tickle her, and she shrieked and dodged away from him. A lively chase ensued in and out of the bushes which decorated the cliff top. Anne stood where she was, listening to Yelena’s shrieks of excited laughter, and looking down thoughtfully at the lawn below, where the Countess, in rose-pink muslin with a white, Chinese silk shawl embroidered with almond-blossom and butterflies, was sitting on a rug with Natasha beside her. Both seemed to be quite immobile, occupied with nothing more than gazing serenely before them, complete in themselves, needing nothing and no one.

A little later the three climbers went back down the path, the Count going first with Yelena riding him pick-a-back, and turning at each steep place to hold his hand up to Anne. The strong, dry palm and long fingers folded round hers each time with an appalling feeling of familiarity, and their linked hands seemed a channel through which some vital force flowed. Him, and me, and Yelena, her bemused brain murmured to her: man, woman and child. What would it be like to be here with them as of right, to be in reality what she now only appeared to be, the third person of that trinity?

‘I hope you’re hungry, Anna Petrovna,’ the Count said as they regained level ground. ‘Kerim’s picnics are unsurpassable. I hope that exercise will have whet your appetite sufficiently.’

‘That’s not her name, Papa,’ Yelena objected sternly, wriggling to get down. ‘It’s Mademoiselle Peters.’

‘Is it indeed, little piker?’ he said in English. ‘I’ll race you back to Mama. One, two, three!’

How much did he feel? Anne brooded on the question all day, as she watched the children splashing naked in the pool. They all sat around together eating the superb food that Kerim had packed into the baskets: cold roast fowl, and meat pies, and pâtés, and spiced sausage, and cake, and fruit. Did I imagine the whole thing? she asked herself as she sketched the scene, the pool and the waterfall, and the semi-somnolent people: Fräulein Hoffnung, in a thick, woollen shawl, reading; Nyanka knitting with her eyes shut; the Countess twirling her parasol on her shoulder, very slowly, first this way, then that; Natasha sitting on her supine father’s up-bent knees, balancing above him with her hands on his and laughing silently at him.

What must I do about it? she asked herself unhappily as she walked with Yelena in the fringes of the wood, hoping to improve the hour by telling her the English names of flowers and trees, and learning from her, where she knew them, the Russian. The sunny day seemed endless, and the longer it went on, the more bemused she grew, like a sun-dazzled bee on a hot window sill, with no answers for anything, and a growing sense of unreality, so that she began to think she had dreamed everything and was dreaming still.

The servants had got the samovar going at a little distance, and tea was preparing. To eat with it there were little cakes and soft biscuits with raisins in them, and a box of the marmelad they had made yesterday.

‘We had better be going back soon,’ the Countess said eventually, the sun gilding her eyelashes and the soft curls on her forehead. ‘The children will be very tired. It’s so easy to forget the hour at this time of the year.’

‘I was thinking, doushenka,’ the Count said, sipping his tea, ‘that it might be a good opportunity to show Miss Peters the peasant village. She ought to see it once, as part of her education.’

‘It’s much too far, Nikolasha,’ the Countess said unemphatically. ‘All the way back to the house, and then another seven or eight versts.’

‘I don’t mean that one,’ he said. ‘I mean the one here, on the other side of this wood. If I take her in the caliche, we can drive by the short-cut through the wood, and it’s hardly any distance at all. We won’t stay long, and if Limonchik puts his feet down smartly, we’ll be back almost as soon as you.’

‘Just as you please,’ the Countess said indifferently. ‘But who is to drive the barouche?’

‘Morkin, of course, and Stefan can drive the kibitka. Would you like to see a peasant village, Miss Peters?’

‘Very much, sir,’ Anne said, striving to keep her voice even. ‘If it will not inconvenience anyone.’

‘Of course not. Nyanka and Fräulein Hoffnung can take charge of the children, and we’ll be back in time for supper.’

Anne determinedly closed her mind to speculation as she took her place beside the Count in the caliche. It was a tight fit, and he chuckled, ‘What a child’s plaything of a carriage this is! It’s a good job you are so slender. Have you room enough there? Are you able to breathe?’

The sun was much lower, and the air was beginning to cool, and Limonchik, revived after his long sleep in the shade of a tree, trotted briskly with his chocolate-coloured ears pricked, the harness jumping and slapping against his round yellow rump as it bobbed along in front of them. They turned off the track which led home, somewhat to Limonchik’s surprise, and on to a narrow path into the wood, and after driving for about ten minutes between the dark trees, they came out at the other side quite suddenly into the slanting afternoon sunshine. The track widened out, leading gently downhill, and at the foot of the slope was the village. The Count halted the caliche half way down, so that Anne could see it all spread out before her.

It was built in linear fashion along either side of the wide earth track, a series of large, stout-looking log houses, with very steep roofs and long, overhanging eaves. Some had dovecotes built into the roof, and pigeons, gilded by the afternoon light, preened and strutted along the roof-tree, cut out against the sky like fantastic decorations. Some of the huts were built with the living quarters raised up and a low beast-shed taking up the ground floor, while others had separate barns and hen-houses attached.

‘The huts are called izby in Russian,’ the Count said. ‘They may be a little rough, but they are snug and dry, and when one thinks of the way peasants live in some parts of Europe… The two big buildings at the end are the kabak, which you know about, and the bath-house – the bania. Everyone goes there on a Saturday afternoon to bathe and put on clean linen, so that they are all clean and decent for the Sabbath. For the rest of the week, I’m afraid, they do very little washing.’

Each izba had a shade tree or two in front of it, a fuel stack neatly built to shed the rain, and a vegetable patch behind where Anne could see cabbages and what looked like cucumbers growing in neat rows. There were hens scratching about, and small children playing in the dust, a dog or two lying in the sun, and a long-horned, red-and-white cow tethered to a tree outside one house. Half-way down the street was a well with a surrounding wall built of logs, and a wooden crane for raising the water. Most of the activity in the village seemed centred on it, for the women going to and from it with pairs of buckets on long poles across their shoulders were the only adults in view.

‘The men will still be out in the fields,’ the Count said, flicking a horsefly from Limonchik’s flank with his whip-stock. ‘They work very long hours at this time of year. The growing season is so short, you see: they have to take two crops off the land between the thaw in May and the frost in October, five or six months at the most. In August, when they have to harvest the oats and plant out the rye, and till their own strips and their landlord’s all at the same time, they sometimes work twenty hours a day.’

‘I’ve noticed all the fields are unenclosed,’ Anne said. ‘We hardly ever see that at home now.’

‘We still work the old three-field system – spring seeds, winter seeds and fallow – which I know you’ve long abandoned in England,’ the Count said ruefully. ‘When I visited England on my Grand Tour, I made a particular study of farming methods, and came back full of youthful enthusiasm to make improvements. I came into my father’s estates when I was a young man, you see, and was eager to make my mark and bring my part of Russia, at least, into the eighteenth century.’

‘And didn’t you?’

‘No. I might have all the enthusiasm in the world, but the peasants can’t bear any interference. They have their routines and traditions, and if anyone tries to change them, they mutter and grumble, and sometimes even take revenge by firing a rick or breaking windows.’

‘Even if the changes are for their own good?’ Anne said.

‘Oh yes. They just don’t like to be meddled with. Ask them to plough the soil an inch more deeply, or offer to drain a marshy field for them, and they start to mutter, “He is not a good master to us. He torments us. He meddles and oppresses us.” ’

‘How silly – and infuriating for you, too,’ Anne said.

‘I suppose there’s some excuse for them, in the precariousness of their living. One false step, one spell of inclement weather, and they face short commons, perhaps even starvation next winter. It’s hardly surprising they aren’t tempted to experiment. The margin is too small.’

‘But if you explained it to them–’

‘They aren’t logical thinkers, like us. They are a strange people, you know, stubborn and ignorant and childlike – full of fantasies and visions and magic, and strange beliefs.’

‘Strange beliefs?’

‘Well, for instance, they believe that all the land in Russia really belongs to them. It seems to date from the time Emperor Peter gave us – the dvoriane – our liberties in the charter of 1762, freeing us from compulsory state service. For some reason the peasants believed that the Emperor made another charter at the same time, turning over all the land to them, but that we repressed it and threw him into jail. For years after his death, they went on believing that he was alive and in hiding – some of them believe it still – and that one day he, or his successor on the imperial throne, will get on with dividing up the land amongst them.’ He looked at her and smiled. ‘They insist on believing that the land belongs to them, and that they belong to us, whereas it is just the other way about: they belong to the land, and the land is ours.’

Anne tried this sentence over once or twice before she could grasp the sense of it, while the Count shook the reins and sent Limonchik on down the slope, turning to the right at the foot of it on to another track. It ran away from the village with oat fields to the left and the pine woods to the right, and, judging by the increased eagerness of the pony’s steps, led towards home.

‘Would you like to take the reins?’ the Count asked. ‘Driving is only a matter of practice, you know. There is no mystery to it.’

Anne took over the reins, and the Count took a little trouble with her, correcting the tension and the way she held the whip, and then they went on in silence for a while, with no sound but the muted, rhythmic thud-thud of Limonchik’s hooves on the dry track, and the jingling of his harness, and the long, slow whisper of the wind through the ripening oats. Where the woods came to an end, the track joined up with the main road again, and Limonchik turned without help from Anne to the right, trotting on with his ears sharply towards the north, where the blueness of the sky had taken on the mysterious, caressing tone of evening, and one white star shone low and steady above his brow-band.

‘It wasn’t only to see the village that I wanted you to come with me in the calèche,’ the Count said suddenly. Anne said nothing, but waited, half terrified, for what he might be going to say, acutely aware of his physical closeness to her, the small movement of his body as he breathed. She kept her eyes fixed on her hands, and the flat leather ribbons of the reins flowing tautly away from them, and the jogging yellow rump in front of her; but she could see his face as clearly as if she were looking at it, the long nose and jaw, the curving, cat-smile of the mouth, and the shining hazel eyes.

His hands came into her vision, closed over hers, and took the tension of the reins, drawing back on the eager pony’s mouth until the strong thud-thud faltered and broke down into the uneven thud-ub-thud-ub of a walk. The round golden rump ceased to blur, and Anne turned her head slowly, as if it hurt, to look at him.

‘When I spoke of the peasants a while ago, and their fantasies and visions and magic… it isn’t just the peasants, you see. It’s in all of us. We all see visions. There’s a magic in Russia that we breathe in. We live our lives half drunk with it, with the beauty, the prostor, drunk with air and sky, drunk with the incense and candlelight of the mass, with the ecstasy of snow in the winter – oh, more different colours and textures of white and blue than you can possibly imagine! And the air so cold and clean it’s like vodka, burning and intoxicating! And in the summer, here in the north, there are what we call the White Nights, when the twilight goes on and on until it meets the dawn, and it never gets dark, and the air is so blue and shining you could drink it! That’s what I wanted you to see, Anna Petrovna – the twilight, the long northern twilight.’

She looked at him, and felt things in her moved and altered, that could never be put back in place.

‘You have been in Russia only a little while, but today I watched you, and I felt sure that you were beginning to feel the magic, and I wanted to make sure of it. I do so want you to love Russia.’

‘Yes,’ she said, and the Count seemed to accept this as sufficient answer to all he had said. His hands, still over hers on the reins, closed a little, in a pressure affectionate, glad, a little triumphant, and his smile intensified in his eyes and on his lips. How then could she feel so sad? she wondered distantly. The feeling that he had for her was something any woman ought to be glad of, a warm affection based on knowledge, sympathy and respect; it was, moreover, the only kind of feeling she could have allowed herself to receive from him, a married man, and her employer. She ought to delight in his good opinion and personal liking. She did delight in it. It was just that it made something inside her want to lie down and howl.

She must speak. ‘I do love Russia,’ she said. ‘And I am so grateful to you for bringing me here, and for taking such care of me. I know I shall be happy in Russia, and with your children, and with–’ Her throat closed up. She tried again. ‘I like my Russian name, too,’ she said unevenly.

He released her hands. ‘I think it is much prettier than Miss Peters. In Russian it is very polite to call someone by name and patronymic like that,’ he added ‘Polite, but friendly too. Shall I call you Anna Petrovna all the time?’

‘Yes, please do,’ she said.

The pony walked steadily on, along the white dust-track, his left side rosy and gilded from the last, low sunlight. To the right the tall oats whispered sleepily, their green-gold heads closing up in the distance into a gently-shifting sea, slicked with mysterious violet shadows, reaching away to where the wooded high ground rose like dark cliffs into the velvet eastern sky. And the evening lengthened all around them, as if, Anne thought, light were a new dimension half-way between space and time; as if it were some new element between air and water, through which they swam like birds.

They were late back to the house. Yelena had refused to go to bed until her father came home, and when he arrived, demanded to be allowed to stay up to supper. Her father, always indulgent, agreed, but supper was a long time being prepared, and it soon became clear that the child was over-tired and over-excited. She became more noisy and tiresome and rude until Anne could bear it no longer and took matters into her own hands, saying Yelena must go to bed at once. Neither of the adult Kirovs made any objection.

‘You’re her governess – you know best,’ the Count said easily, looking up from the cellar book which he had sent for, to choose some wine appropriate to what he regarded as a special, celebratory evening. ‘Go with Anna Petrovna, galubchik. You’re very tired.’

Anne took the child’s hand, but she snatched it back and began running round and round the room. Anne looked towards the Count, but he had evidently turned the situation over to her, so she felt it was up to her to be firm. She caught Yelena on one of her circuits, closed her finges round the small wrist, and towed her screaming out of the room.

Out in the hall she shook Yelena sharply and said, ‘Stop that noise this instant!’

‘I won’t go to bed, I won’t!’ Yelena shrieked.

‘If you don’t walk up the stairs quietly with me now, I shall carry you over my shoulder. Remember who you are, Yelena Nikolayevna,’ Anne said quietly, but with all the determination she could muster. Yelena’s lip thrust out rebelliously, but she thought of the indignity of such a proceeding, and consented to trail along unwillingly at Anne’s side. At the door of the nursery, Anne passed the child over to the care of Nyanka, who summed up the situation in an instant, clucked and tutted and addressed Yelena in soothing Russian phrases, and gave Anne a nod over her head of approval and dismissal.

Supper was finally served. The Countess seemed more than usually silent, and Anne had nothing to say, only sipped the fragrant, flowery wine the Count had chosen, as if in a reverie. All the conversation was between the Count and Fräulein Hoffnung, who discussed the wines of the Rhineland knowledgeably and, in her case, with nostalgia. When the lamps were lit and the table cleared, the latter three went out on to the terrace while the Countess played pensively on the pianoforte. The air was scented with white summer jasmine, and the notes from the piano dropped into the quietness like small pebbles into a clear pool. The Count lit a cigar, and soft brown moths fluttered out of the dimness and pattered against the drawing-room windows.

Anne stood at the balustrade, her forearms resting against the cold stone. The long twilight seemed to reverberate against the memory like faint music, as if there had been some time immeasurably long ago when she had stood like this, gazing into the luminous eastern darkness, feeling the blue air brush against her skin like warm silk, while the violet shadows of bats flickered shrieking back and forth after insects, half-seen, half-heard.

The Count was near, leaning in the same attitude and smoking his cigar; companionably silent, not touching, and yet connected somehow. Anne felt everything in her, all the thoughts and feelings of the day, and of weeks past, melting and merging together, distilling out inside her towards some single clear drop of perfect experience. All of life, she thought, was a striving towards the place where knowledge was perfectly matched by understanding, where a thing seen or done was felt and known with every particle of the self. That place seemed immeasurably far off, and yet not foreign to her, as if she had known it before, and would recognise it when she came to it, as she would recognise her childhood home.

And he was part of it. She didn’t understand how or why; perhaps he was simply another traveller along the same road, someone with whom to share the journey; or perhaps he was more, a guide, or native interpreter. Perhaps, in some strange way, he was part of the journey itself. She didn’t know, but she felt just then that he was aware of the connection between them, and was at ease with it.

As if he heard her thoughts, the Count turned his head, and they both smiled, the serene and contented smile of two people at peace with themselves and each other. Anne was aware even then that such moments of equilibrium come rarely, and that they do not last. Tomorrow, she thought, I shall be as confused and fallible and unhappy as everyone else; but as such moments inevitably pass, they always come again. The godlike, untroubled sensation expanded on the warm air, and enclosed the two people in a bubble which seemed both fragile and indestructible.

Chapter Eight

Now the normal routine of life began for Anne. There were lessons with Yelena in the little schoolroom. At first it was so difficult to make her concentrate, it was sometimes easier to move her from place to place and construct the lesson around some object or aspect of the house. She had never been obliged to work at anything, and, if pressed, grew either sulky or rebellious. She had not yet fully accepted Anne, and Anne knew there were fearful battles ahead of them.

There were lessons on the pianoforte, and sketching- lessons, mostly given out of doors when Yelena grew too restless to be kept in the schoolroom, and Fräulein Hoffnung took her for an hour each day to teach German and history, which allowed Anne time to do other things: cutting out her riding habit, doing her own piano practice, and studying Russian, in which she was determined to be proficient, for many of the servants spoke no other language. Nyanka’s attitude towards her softened perceptibly every time she acquired a new word, and the more Anne tried to speak Russian, the more kindly Nyanka consented to address her in French.0

She did not yet teach Natasha, although sometimes, to accustom her to the idea of education, Nyanka would bring her to sit in the schoolroom during one of Yelena’s lessons. Nyanka would sit in the corner, vastly overspilling a little schoolroom chair, and get on with her knitting or sewing, while Natasha sat on the floor at her feet with some doll or toy to keep her occupied. With Natasha there was never any cause to complain about noise: even when pushing a wheeled elephant back and forth across the waxed wooden floor, evidently engaged in some imaginary adventure, she made no sound, though her lips sometimes moved as if in commentary. After the first few visits, Anne noticed, to her amusement, that Natasha would sit her doll up and give it lessons, copying Anne’s gestures and making the doll go through Yelena’s motions. Every now and then the curly head would lift and the amber eyes would regard her solemnly and carefully for a few moments rather like a portrait painter referring to his subject. Anne did her best not to be unnerved by this minutely noticing gaze, and wondered how she would cope with it when she actually had to teach Natasha.

Every morning, unless it rained, Anne took both children out for a walk, accompanied either by Nyanka or Tanya, or more often by Fräulein Hoffnung. Anne grew to like the elderly governess. Though her education was narrow, she had a native shrewdness, and a great deal of experience of children on which Anne could draw. Her conversation was often amusing, full of strange turns of phrase, quaint adages, and English proverbs imperfectly remembered. She was patient and good, though rather slow, and Anne observed with inner amusement and understanding how Yelena was sometimes driven through frustration to torment her, and then felt guilty afterwards because she was so kind.

The daily walk was usually, by request, to the red stables and the farm buildings. The dairy was a favourite haunt – both children loved to watch the cows being milked, or the cheese being turned out – and they usually finished up at Marya Petrovna’s, to stroke the pig and hear a story. The old lady had a fund of Russian folk-tales and fairy-tales, usually involving talking animals and retribution by the world of Nature on human beings who thought too well of themselves. The children could never have enough of these, and would sit at her feet while her nimble fingers drew the embroidery silk back and forth, or flashed amongst the lace bobbins, as though they were weaving the story right there before their eyes.

With Marya Petrovna’s professional touch in the making-up, Anne’s riding habit was soon ready, and the Countess donated a smart hat with a veil, hardly used, from her extensive wardrobe. Looking in the mirror the first time she tried them on, Anne saw herself with new eyes. The colour was perfect for her, and together with the smart cut of the habit made her appear striking, where before she had always felt herself to be pleasing enough, but insignificant.

The Count provided her with a bay mare called Grafina, who had pleasant paces and a good mouth, and thus mounted she took out Yelena, riding astride on Tigu, one of the Tibetan ponies, or sometimes accompanied the Countess on the beautiful chestnut Iskra, whose name meant ‘Flame’. The Countess adored her mare with a passion, and the two were in obvious sympathy with each other. The Countess rode well, and with unexpected boldness. She seemed a different person on a horse. Fräulein Hoffnung said that this was because she was from the Caucasus, where children learned to ride before they could walk.

‘They are great horsemen, the hill people,’ she said. ‘Madame rides like a Cyclops, like all her family. They’re great horse-breeders, too. Iskra is a Karabakh – their special breed, famed all over Russia for swiftness and beauty. I don’t know much about these things, but I do know that Karabakhs can cost anything up to eight hundred roubles.’

On Sunday mornings, when the family went to mass, Anne would sometimes take her work and go and sit with Fräulein Hoffnung in her sitting room, and from the talks they had at those times, Anne learned a good deal about Russia, and about the family’s history. The Kirovs were the third family Fräulein Hoffnung had worked for, although she had been with them for most of her life. She had been governess, and then chaperone to the Count’s sisters, until he had married and produced children of his own, when she had transferred to his service. Thus she had known the Count since his boyhood.

‘He was the sweetest-tempered child I ever knew,’ she said. ‘His own son is the same, my dear little Sergei – not so little now, I suppose, though I can hardly think of him at cadet school when it seems only yesterday that I was watching him take his first steps. But he is the same sweet-tempered boy his father was. It often works that way, you know – the apple tree grows apples, and the thorn tree thorns.’

‘And when Sergei is not at school, does he come here?’

‘He visits from time to time, but he lives mostly with his grandmother, the Count’s mother. She is very fond of him and likes to have him with her. Grandmother-hunger, we call it. Of course, he has his cousins nearby in Moscow, but I sometimes think it is a pity he should not see more of his other sisters – and his new mother, too. But the Dowager Countess is a very determined woman, and it’s not to be supposed… It was she who chose the Count’s first wife, Sergei’s and Lolya’s mother, and she was very fond of her, so it’s hardly surprising that she wants to keep Sergei with her, to remind her.’

She sighed and relapsed into a contemplative silence. There seemed to be several intriguing hints here about the family’s relationships, but Anne did not yet know her colleague well enough to judge how she would react to probing on such matters. Fräulein Hoffnung was fiercely loyal to the Kirovs, After a while, Anne asked her if the Kirovs were particularly kind and generous, or whether the treatment she had received were the general rule in Russia.

‘Ah, Miss Peters,’ Fräulein Hoffnung said, putting down her work to clasp her thin, age-freckled hands at her breast, ‘since I first came to Russia forty years ago, I have met with nothing but kindness and respect everywhere I went! Always I ate with the family, not just when they were alone, but on the grandest occasions; taken to the ballet and the opera, to balls; given such presents! Ach, das is doch ausgezeichnet! Everywhere, I was welcomed. That is the Russian character, to make one welcome. I cannot begin to tell you!’ She reached into her reticule for a handkerchief to dab at the corner of her eye.

‘So it isn’t just the Count and Countess?’ Anne said.

‘Ach, no! I could have been married once, you know,’ she said, nodding her head significantly. ‘A young man of very good family addressed me – this was when I was much younger, of course – and not only did the Count – the present Count’s father, you understand – give his blessing, but the young man’s family set aside all consideration of a dowry. Where else in Europe would you meet with such generosity?’

‘Why didn’t you marry him?’ Anne wanted to know.

Fräulein Hoffnung drew a deep sigh and picked up her work again. ‘Ah, my dear, I couldn’t leave my young ladies, dear Annushka and dearest Shoora! When a woman becomes a governess, she gives up all thoughts of love and marriage.’

The crisis of discipline with Yelena was not long in coming. One evening the Tchaikovskys came for cards and supper, bringing with them their grown-up son and daughter, Vassili – or Basil, as he preferred to be called – and Olga. The young Tchaikovskys were the leaders of the smart and fashionable younger set, and Anne had heard so many tales of them that she had been quite nervous about meeting them. They were talked of as inseparables going everywhere together, and despite Basil’s being nearly thirty, and Olga twenty-seven, they firmly refused to get married, each declaring that no one could match the other’s beauty and intelligence. They had large allowances, and divided their time between Moscow and the newly fashionable Crimea, from which they had just returned after visiting an aunt and uncle of whom they had expectations.

As so often in life, Anne found the reality less daunting than the reputation. The young people were expensively dressed in the ‘high French’ style that was fashionable amongst the wealthy, and despite the difference of their ages and sexes, they looked remarkably alike: both tall and slender, with dark, high-nosed faces, thick black hair, and rather bulging, pale-green eyes, like translucent, ripe grapes. They had the air of being handsome, which probably, Anne reflected, served rather better than the reality; and while they spoke with a great deal of self-assurance, neither, to her notice, said anything either very clever or very original.

The Countess was clearly daunted by them, and their parents intensely proud of them. The Count, with his most inscrutable smile, encouraged them to talk, laugh, and give their opinions more and more freely as the evening went on, occasionally catching Anne’s eye with a look of unspeakable innocence. It was well for her self-esteem that he did, for in the young Tchaikovskys she met for the first time in Russia something of the attitude she had grown accustomed to in England. Olga looked her over once sharply on being introduced and dismissed her as beneath her notice, and thereafter never spoke to or looked at her again the whole evening, while Basil looked down the neck of her gown as he bowed over her hand, and each time she spoke, used the opportunity to ogle her in a manner Anne thought both lascivious and patronising, as if she ought to be grateful to be thought worth leering at.

Her self-esteem suffered more that evening, however, through Yelena’s behaviour. She had hoped that she was beginning to work some good on her pupil, but Yelena grew more and more excited as the evening wore on: she interrupted the conversation, swung on the furniture, knocked things over, and snatched rudely at every dish that appeared. Anne’s remonstrances served only to provoke her to worse behaviour, and when even old Madame Tchaikovskova’s patience was fractured by Yelena’s knocking over her glass of wine for the second time, Anne could restrain herself no longer, and swept Yelena out of the room before she had time to resist.

Yelena bellowed, fought, and bit all the way up the stairs, and it took both Anne and Nyanka to detach her from the door-frame of the nursery, where she clung with both hands, howling with rage. Once she was inside, Nyanka gripped her charge round the waist with an arm like a bolster, summoned Tanya’s assistance, and dismissed Anne with a jerk of the head. Seeing the red glare that Yelena was directing towards her, Anne thought the child would probably calm down more quickly if she went away and took her leave with haste and relief.

The rest of the evening in the drawing-room passed quietly, and Anne had put the incident from her mind by the time she went up to bed. In her chamber she washed her face, cleaned her teeth, took off her clothes and put on her nightgown, all by the faint but sufficient light of the white night outside. She climbed into bed, and jumped out again much more quickly than she got in: her bed was wet. Lighting her candle, she held it close, and saw that a large patch in the centre was thoroughly soaked, as though water had been poured over it. In a moment of complete bewilderment, she stared up at the ceiling, and then down at the floor; and then noticed a trail of spots of water which, though they had dried out already on this warm night, had left whitish marks on the waxed floor.

Grimly, she put on her wrapper and, candle in hand, followed the trail out of the door and down the passage, already guessing what had happened – knowing it would lead to the nursery and to Yelena’s wash-stand pitcher, now standing empty. The nursery rumbled gently to Nyanka’s snoring. Anne padded softly over to Yelena’s bed and looked at the face against the pillows grimly sleeping, the eyelashes fluttering in their determination not to be tricked into looking.

‘Enough,’ she said grimly. ‘Get up, Yelena Nikolayevna. You are coming with me. Get up, up, up!’ And she whipped the covers off with one hand. Yelena, exposed to the night air, jerked together like a hedgehog rolling up, opened her eyes and looked at Anne with a mixture of apprehension and defiance. ‘Up,’ said Anne again, taking hold of her wrist and tugging her upright.

‘What is it? What’s the matter?’ came Tanya’s sleepy voice from the other side of the room. Anne turned, holding the candle near her face so that she could be seen.

‘It’s nothing,’ she said soothingly. ‘Go back to sleep.’ Tanya sat up, but showed no inclination to interfere, only watched, puzzled, as Anne thrust Yelena’s wrapper at her and then urged and prodded her out of the room. ‘Go to sleep, Tanya,’ Anne said as she passed.

Out in the corridor, Yelena looked up at her darkly. ‘I’m supposed to be in bed,’ she said. ‘I’m supposed to sleep. It’s very bad for me to be woken up.’

‘Oh, but you weren’t asleep,’ Anne said pleasantly, ‘and you and I have a little job to do.’

‘I’ll tell Papa,’ she offered, rather feebly.

‘Good,’ Anne said. ‘I’ll tell him too, in the morning.’

‘It was only a joke,’ she said now, subdued by Anne’s immovability, and Anne took her hand and led her along towards the backstairs, where the housemaids’ cupboard was.

‘Quite,’ said Anne. ‘Now you are going to help me make the bed again, and then we’ll decide what to do with you. I might have a joke or two I want to play on you.’

Yelena offered no further protest or justification, but went meekly through the process of finding fresh bedclothes, carrying them back to Anne’s room, stripping the bed, and making it up anew. The mattress was rather damp in the middle, even when Yelena had sopped it with towels, so they folded several more dry towels over the patch before putting on the sheet.

‘Tomorrow it will have to be dried out properly,’ Anne said, ‘but for tonight it will have to do. I just hope I don’t get rheumatism.’

Yelena looked up at her under her brows. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said abruptly. Anne’s heart contracted with relief at the words, the first sign of yielding in her intractable pupil; but she said nothing, only nodded slightly.

Yelena bit her lip. ‘I know,’ she offered, ‘I’ll sleep in it, and you can sleep in my bed. And then if I get sick, it will be my punishment.’

It was so innocently said that Anne repressed a smile. ‘No, I don’t think that’s a very good idea. We shall have to think about how you can make it up to me. You can let me know if you have any good ideas. And now you had better go back to bed. Come.’

She held out her hand, and they retraced their steps.

‘Will you tell Papa?’ Yelena asked after a moment. Anne glanced down, and saw the fan of eyelashes against the rounded cheek as Yelena fixed her eyes on the floor. ‘He’d be very angry.’ Anne thought privately that his anger, if it existed at all, would be much more formal than real: his indulgence towards his daughter seemed endless.

‘No, I shan’t tell him. Not as it was just a joke,’ she said. Yelena’s hand relaxed in hers. In the nursery, Tanya stirred, watching them, but did not sit up. Anne put down the candle, helped Yelena into bed, and pulled the covers up around her. ‘Goodnight, Yelena Nikolayevna,’ she said. ‘Tomorrow, perhaps, we can think of some more jokes together – but funny ones, this time.’

Yelena regarded her thoughtfully, her eyes black pools with twin candle flames in their centres. ‘You can call me Lolya,’ she offered. Anne smiled, and the corners of Lolya’s mouth moved in response. ‘And I’ll call you Anna Petrovna, if you like,’ she added with enormous generosity.

‘Yes, I like,’ said Anne.

It was a beginning. Yelena did not become an angel overnight, but now licensed to call her Lolya, Anne found much less difficulty in making contact with her, and began to be able to interest her in her lessons, instead of merely forcing her to endure them. Fräulein Hoffnung noticed the difference at once and congratulated Anne on having broken down the first barrier. It would be a long time, they both knew, before Lolya completely accepted and trusted her new instructress, but it was a start, and, as Fräulein Hoffnung said, ‘Rome vass not burnt in a day’.

One day, as Anne approached the breakfast room, she heard the Count’s voice raised in irritation: ‘For God’s sake, Irina, don’t begin that again! It’s stupid, and you know it!’

Anne was shocked, never having heard him raise his voice in anger before; and was even more shocked at the little thread of pleasure she discovered in herself, that he should so berate his wife for stupidity. Rebuking herself fiercely, she made a noise at the breakfast room door before opening it, and when she entered, they were composed: the Count reading his letters, the Countess, eyes down, picking listlessly at a roll of bread.

The under-butler, Yakob, followed Anne in and drew out her chair for her, and a moment later Fräulein Hoffnung brought the children in, and the normal morning routine was re-established. But Anne, watching the Countess from the corner of her eye, thought she looked less at ease than usual. She seemed a little pale, and her lips were tense.

Later, in a lull in the conversation, the Countess spoke up, her voice serene as always.

‘Really, I must take my poor Iskra out today. She has had so little exercise recently.’

That’s right, Anne thought approvingly: the best remedy is to seek the comfort of the great outdoors, and the unfailing love of a favourite animal.

The Countess went on, ‘But I do not like to ride alone. Will you ride with me, Anna Petrovna? Fräulein Hoffnung can take Yelena’s lessons this morning, can’t you, dear Fräulein?’

‘Of course, madame–’ the Fräulein began, and the Count, without looking up, said, ‘I think it will rain. You had better not go far.’

Anne, who was still looking at her mistress, saw her amber eyes shine and her lips tremble, and knew, quite certainly, that the unspoken words hovering there were ‘I shall go as far as I please!’ For a moment she felt a sympathy with her, liking her better for that flash of temper, repressed though it was.

‘I want to come too,’ Yelena said, inevitably. ‘I want to ride with you. I don’t want to do lessons.’

‘Not today, Lolya,’ the Countess said with unexpected firmness. ‘Today I want to ride very fast.’ Her husband shot her a brief look at those words, but said nothing, and she stood up and said to Anne, ‘Shall we go and get ready?’

Anne got up to follow her mistress, and the Count rose courteously to his feet, watching them both with a quizzical expression. The Countess inclined her head towards him, and Anne, embarrassed at being obliged to stand between them, followed her out without meeting his eyes, hearing behind her Lolya’s renewed complaint.

‘I want to go too! Why can’t I go? It isn’t fair!’

In the stable-yard, Anne looked at the sky while they waited for the horses to be brought out, and wondered if the Count were right about the rain, or if he had simply been trying to spoil his wife’s pleasure. It was clear overhead, though there were clouds on the horizon, and there was a small, cool breeze, which served to make the heat more tolerable. She didn’t yet know enough about the region to know if rain were likely, but there seemed to her to be no immediate sign of it. And anyway, she thought, if the worst came to the worst, a little wetting wouldn’t hurt two healthy young females.

There was a measured clopping of shod hooves on brick, and two grooms led Iskra and Grafina out into the yard, already saddled, their coats gleaming and their eyes bright with pleasure at the prospect of going out. The horses were led to the mounting blocks, and two more grooms came running to check that the girths were tight, and to help the ladies up. Anne freed her habit from under her leg and hooked her knee round the pommel, found her stirrup, arranged her skirts, and gathered up the reins. The Countess turned to her with bright eyes.

‘Are you ready? Very well. Stand aside, Yurka!’

Iskra flung her head up and down and jogged even as they walked them out of the yard, and Anne felt a moment’s apprehension – she seemed so fresh. But from her own past observation, the Countess really could ride ‘like a cyclops’ and the present fidgetings did not seem to be troubling her. Anne trotted the sensible Grafina a few steps to catch up, and once they were outside the gates, the Countess said, ‘Let’s gallop to settle them down.’

Iskra was off before the last word was out; Grafina threw her head up and snorted, Anne lost a rein, and the bay took off in pursuit. The Countess, Anne saw, was urging her mare on: she could see her booted foot digging away at the chestnut’s side. She ought to have waited until I was ready, she thought angrily, and having regained her reins and balance, urged Grafina to catch up. Iskra was much too fast, however, and the flying figure drew further and further ahead.

After a while, the distant golden speck slowed and stopped, and Grafina, blowing a little, began to catch up. The Countess turned Iskra and stood waiting as Anne rode up to her. Her cheeks were bright and her eyes moist – though that was nothing, Anne’s were too, from the wind – but her expression was almost normal, and she spoke in her usual, unemphatic voice.

‘I’m sorry I left you behind. I needed to let go and fly, just a little. We’ll go more steadily now, I promise. Are you all right?’

‘Yes,’ Anne said. ‘Poor Grafina is not as fast as your mare. She didn’t like being deserted.’

‘No, they don’t,’ the Countess said, turning and walking on as Anne fell in beside her. ‘Horses hate to be alone. But then horses are never unkind to each other.’

Surprised, and a little apprehensive, Anne waited for the confidence she thought was to come. But the Countess said nothing more, and they rode in silence for some time. When she did speak again, it was to comment on the scenery and the route they were to take.

They rode in a wide half-circle, coming up through the woods from a different direction to the outcrop where the waterfall was, and halted there to breathe the horses and look at the view.

‘It’s so flat here,’ the Countess said. ‘I was brought up in the mountains, you know.’ Her eyes moved sideways to glance at Anne. She seemed to want to confide, but not to know how. She couldn’t have had much practice at it, Anne thought with some compassion.

‘Yes, Fräulein Hoffnung told me so,’ she said encouragingly. It seemed to have been the wrong thing to say.

‘Ah, the good Fräulein,’ the Countess remarked – ironically? ‘She was governess to Nikolai’s sisters, did you know that?’

‘Yes – yes, she told me about that. She often speaks of those days.’ The Countess looked straight ahead, her mouth uncompromising. Anne tried again. ‘She speaks highly of all the family.’

‘She would,’ she Countess said shortly. ‘The Kirovs make a great impression on everyone.’

Ah, was that it? Anne wondered suddenly. Were there family jealousies, family tensions? Had she quarrelled with the Count’s sisters? But she could not imagine this strange, introspective woman quarrelling with anybody. She could think of nothing useful to say, and continued to look out over the plain towards the house. The breeze whipped up a little more sharply, turning a lock of Grafina’s thin mane, and Anne noticed that the clouds which had been on the horizon were coming up more rapidly than she had expected. The sky above them was still blue, but there was an unpleasant, steely quality to the blueness that troubled her a little.

She was about to mention it, when the Countess said abruptly, ‘Let’s get on,’ and turned Iskra to the left, picking a way down the slope towards the woods.

‘I think it may rain,’ Anne ventured, following her.

‘We’ll be under the trees if it does,’ the Countess said indifferently. She seemed to know where she was going, so Anne followed her patiently, wondering if anything more revealing would eventually be said. They entered the trees, and rode deeper into the wood, so that Anne soon lost her sense of direction. It seemed to be growing very dark, and she didn’t know if that were because of gathering clouds, or simply because they were under the trees. It was very still and silent in the forest: there was no birdsong, no insects buzzing, and the horses’ hooves made little sound on the thick carpet of dead needles. But high above them, the upper branches of the pines were lashing back and forth with a sound like the sea, and once or twice a pine-cone, dislodged, fell with a thud and a bounce on the path before them.

The Countess seemed to be riding automatically, paying no attention to anything around her. Her blank golden eyes stared straight ahead, and her mouth was set more grimly than usual. Anne began to grow both bored and apprehensive. It was definitely darker, and growing quite chilly, and while she did not mind getting a little wet, she did not relish a’soaking.

Then suddenly there was a tremendous clap of thunder, like a short, sharp explosion, which startled Iskra almost out of her skin, and made even Grafina flinch. Both horses flicked their ears back and forth nervously, and a moment later a vivid flash of lightning penetrated the gloom of the forest, followed by a long grumble of renewed thunder.

‘Madame, the storm–’ Anne said, not even sure whether the Countess had noticed. ‘I’m afraid it may rain at any moment.’

‘Well, we are under the trees,’ the Countess said shortly. ‘We are sheltered.’

‘But madame, I was always told not to shelter under a tree if there were lightning.’

‘Under a solitary tree, not in the middle of a forest. We are quite safe. Don’t fuss so.’

Anne was astonished to hear her speak so shortly and said nothing more, riding on beside and a little behind her, while the wind moaned in the tree tops, and lightning flashes and long rumblings of thunder grew more frequent. Then the trees thinned out, and they were out on the other side of the forest, and Anne could see for herself how plum-coloured clouds had rolled up to cover the whole sky, making a strange and threatening twilight in the middle of the day. It was going to rain, and rain mightily, at any moment!

The Countess, however, rode straight forward, leaving the shelter of the trees behind. Anne shivered, hating to feel so exposed, and paradoxically more afraid of the lightning than she had been when under the trees. Below and to the right she could see the peasant village she had visited with the Count, and she felt a small surge of relief. Now at last she knew where they were.

‘Madame,’ she said, ‘ought we not at least to ride in the direction of home?’

The Countess opened her mouth to reply, and there was a sudden chill gust of wind which lifted their hair, and the storm broke over them. The rain fell in large drops, the first few warm, and then, as it grew heavier, unpleasantly cold. The horses laid back their ears, and Iskra sidled unhappily, trying to get away from the hard raindrops smacking her rump. The Countess looked about her, almost as if she had woken from a dream, and Anne, raising her voice over the drumming of the rain on the dusty track, said, ‘We must take shelter! Shall we head for the trees again?’

Iskra performed several tight circles on the spot, and the Countess, straightening her out with a firm hand, said, ‘No, we had better ride to the village. We can shelter in one of the houses. This won’t last long – it never does when it’s so violent.’

She put the mare into a canter, and Anne followed, bowing her head and turning her face sideways out of the blinding rain, praying that Grafina would be able to keep her feet on the greasy track and pick her own way. They cantered full pelt down the slope, and a moment later skidded to a halt under the sheltering trees outside the first house in the village street. The Countess swung her leg free and jumped down, and at the same moment, an old man with a stick came hobbling out of the house, followed by a young woman in the usual peasant garb of cotton dress, shawl, and handkerchief tied about her head.

Anne heard an exchange going on in Russian as she freed herself and jumped down, and the young woman, who had taken Iskra’s reins, held her hand out for Grafina’s, and led the horses swiftly away through the teeming rain towards the barn next to the house. The old man bowed several times to the Countess, and then to Anne, and with voluble gestures of his free hand for them to follow, hobbled briskly towards the house.

A moment later, gasping and with water running down her neck, Anne ducked in out of the rain, and had her first view of the inside of a peasant house. It was only a single-storey building, but the ceiling was very high, going right up into the steep pitch of the roof. The atmosphere was close and smoky, for the stove was alight, and there was no chimney. The stove took up about a quarter of the space inside the hut, a huge oblong made of baked clay, with a large opening at one end through which Anne could see the light of the flames inside. It reached half-way up the height of the room, and above it, there was a wooden structure, like two tiers of broad wooden shelves, which Anne could not immediately account for.

The walls of the house were of plain wood, and she could hear the rain drumming against the roof. There was very little in the way of furniture – a large wooden table with wooden benches drawn up to it, and some shelves high up on the walls, on which bowls and jugs and boxes were stacked. Opposite the door, in the corner to the left, was a shelf with a lamp burning on it before an icon of the Mother and Child, and even as Anne entered and looked about her, she saw the Countess bow reverently towards it and cross herself.

The old man now looked at Anne expectantly, and when she stared back, not knowing what was wanted of her, he frowned and growled something in Russian. The Countess turned to Anne.

‘Do as I did. Bow to the icon and cross yourself.’

‘But I’m not–’

‘Do it. They will be horribly offended otherwise,’ she said sternly. Anne, with an inward shrug, obeyed, remembering at the last moment to cross herself the Orthodox way. She felt very awkward about it, but appreciated that it would be easier than explaining her to the inmates and persuading them not to mind, and hoped that God would understand.

There were a good many people in the room: the old man, two old women, a middle-aged woman crouching in front of the opening of the stove, and – Anne counted quickly – six children of different sizes, including a baby swinging in a sort of small hammock hung from the cross-beam. As soon as Anne had performed the ritual, they all smiled welcomingly, and a splurge of chatter broke out, and two of the women came forward to help them off with their hats and jackets, tutting and clucking about the rain, and carried them away to prop them on a wooden frame against the wall of the stove to dry.

The young woman came back and said something to the Countess about the horses – Anne knew one or two words now – and then gestured for them to sit down on one of the benches, and went over to feed the stove. Anne sat beside the Countess, with the disagreeable feeling of water in her boots, and began to pull off her gloves, which, being made of soft leather, were clinging to her fingers like a second skin.

‘It’s customary, you see,’ the Countess explained, engaged on the same task, ‘for everyone entering the house to make obeisance to the beautiful corner, before they are permitted to speak or sit down. It’s a rule they keep very strictly, without exceptions.’

Anne nodded. ‘I understand. Is that what they call it – the beautiful corner?’

‘Yes – krasnyi ugolok, in Russian.’

‘But I thought krasnyi means “red”,’ Anne frowned. It was one of the words she knew well, having heard the ‘red stables’ spoken of every day on her morning walk with the children.

‘It’s the same word,’ the Countess said indifferently. ‘Krasnyi means both red and beautiful.’

‘Why?’ Anne wanted to know.

‘I don’t know,’ the Countess said without interest. ‘We’ll shelter here until the rain stops. The young woman will make us some tea, I expect. What do you think of your first peasant house?’

‘It’s very snug, and bigger than I expected,’ Anne said, looking around her. The two old women and the old man were all looking at her, and as she caught their eyes they all beamed and nodded delightedly, and she smiled and nodded in return. This happened every time she looked up, and though rather tiring, was ample evidence of their good will. ‘There is one thing that strikes me as odd, though – I can’t see any beds. Where do they all sleep?’

‘Above the stove, of course, for warmth,’ said the Countess. Thus prompted, Anne could see how it was arranged. The lower level of sleepers would lie directly on the clay roof of the stove, and in winter, she imagined would be delightfully snug; those on the upper level, raised above them on the wooden superstructure which had puzzled her, would benefit from the rising warm air.

‘What a clever idea,’ she exclaimed, and received another round of smiles and nods from the old folk, who didn’t understand her words, but were watching her expression carefully. ‘I suppose they decide who gets the best place by seniority.’

‘I suppose so,’ said the Countess indifferently, and Anne thought how much more she would have enjoyed this visit with the Count, who would have told her all manner of fascinating things. It was hard not to think disloyal thoughts about her mistress when in so many small ways she proved herself unworthy of her master.

The samovar was steaming, and soon the tea was brought and handed round with more nods and smiles. Anne essayed a sentence of thanks in Russian, which seemed to go down well. The Countess said something in which Anne distinguished the words barishnya and Angliskaya, and understood herself to be being explained to the inmates, and there were cries of enlightenment and renewed welcome before everyone settled down again to watch the great ladies drink their tea.

The tea seemed to revive the Countess. After the first few sips, she stopped staring blankly at the wall and looked at Anne a little hesitantly.

‘I seem to have behaved rather badly,’ she said. ‘I’m very sorry you have had a soaking for my foolishness.’

Anne was astonished to receive an apology, and it took a moment for her to assemble the right thing to say. ‘Please – I don’t mind in the least. I’m always doing things and thinking better of them later.’ That didn’t sound quite right, and she added hastily, ‘I mean, you weren’t to know there would be a storm.’

The Countess actually smiled, the first frank and natural smile Anne had ever received from her. ‘Oh, but I knew perfectly well there would be a storm. I wanted to get wet. But I shouldn’t have made you suffer too.’

‘I’m not suffering,’ Anne said. ‘I’m seeing the inside of an izba – is that right? And I enjoyed the ride. But I wonder why you didn’t go out alone, if you felt like that?’

‘I thought… ’ The Countess hesitated, and then shrugged. ‘I have been very much alone this last year, while Nikolai has been away. At home I always had my sisters to talk with. And now I thought – I hoped – that perhaps I could talk to you.’

Anne felt a rush of renewed shame at the unkind private thoughts she had been harbouring. ‘Of course, if you wish,’ she said, and then, thinking it sounded churlish, she added, ‘I should be honoured by your confidence.’

There was a silence, as the Countess arranged her thoughts, and then she said hesitantly, ‘I was upset, this morning, you see. I suppose you guessed that. That’s why I wanted to ride out. I had to get away. It’s foolish, but… when I am troubled, the only thing I want to do is to saddle Iskra and gallop and gallop.’ Anne thought of the Count’s sharp words she had overheard, and felt embarrassed. It would not do for the Countess to confide anything of too intimate a nature to her.

‘I can understand that. And I guessed you were a little – unhappy,’ she said cautiously.

It seemed to breach the dam. ‘Unhappy? Yes, yes, that’s the word! Unhappy, and afraid. Unhappy because I’m afraid. Nikolasha says it’s stupid, and I can see that to him it must seem so, but he does not know – he cannot know. He thinks her the model of womanhood.’

Her? Anne thought. Oh God, am I to hear of some affaire she has discovered? No, no, it couldn’t be. He would never do such a thing. ‘Who, madame?’ she asked bravely.

‘His mother,’ the Countess said, and gave a groan as if speaking the word had been a relief. ‘Vera Borisovna, the Dowager Countess Kirova! How she hates me!’

Anne glanced anxiously at the peasants, for the Countess’s voice was vehement, but she intercepted the glance and said, ‘Oh it’s all right, they don’t understand French. Nikolai had a letter from her this morning to say she is coming to stay, and that was what began it all.’ She stared at her hands. ‘You can’t imagine’, she went on in a lower voice, ‘how she terrifies me. She criticises everything I do, and finds fault, and asks me questions only to catch me out. She did not want Nikolasha to marry me. She thought I was unworthy to take the place of the woman she chose for him, and she makes me know it all the time. That was why she took Sergei away, to show me I was not fit to bring up her grandson. But of course,’ she added despairingly, ‘Nikolai never realises any of that. To him she speaks politely about me, even praises me. He never hears that she is being ironic.’

‘I’m surprised,’ Anne said. ‘I thought him a sensitive man.’

The Countess looked up. ‘All men are blind when it comes to their mother. You will learn that one day.’ She sighed. ‘Besides, she brought him up alone from an early age, after his father died, so her influence with him is very great. He thinks her a saint. He can’t see–’ She stopped abruptly and relapsed into silence.

Anne looked at the averted profile, half wishing the Countess had not confided in her, for it gave her something else to complicate her feelings. One part of her sympathised, as woman to woman, able easily to imagine how difficult a predicament it must be, and how impossible it would be to persuade any man that his mother was not as he thought her; another part felt that she would have managed somehow to get on with Vera Borisovna, or at least have explained matters to the Count so as to win his support. It seemed to her poor-spirited to be so upset over the attitude of someone who at most would be inflicted on one for a few weeks of the year; and then she looked at the unhappy droop of the Countess’s mouth and remembered the Count’s harsh words, and was angry with him for being so unfeeling towards one whom it was his duty to protect and support.

‘Have you tried to explain to him how you feel?’ Anne said at last.

‘Oh yes. But it makes him angry. He wants me to welcome his mother when she visits, and I try to, but it isn’t enough because he knows it isn’t from the heart. He should never have married me,’ she added in a small, sad voice. ‘There was no need. He already had a son, and my dowry was nothing, nothing.’

Anne forced herself to speak. ‘You mustn’t say that. He married you because he wanted to. He loves you, madame, surely you know that?’

She glanced up. ‘Do you think so? I wonder sometimes. I am not clever like you, and he has always admired intellectual women.’

Oh this was bitter! It was so innocently spoken. ‘He loves you, I’m sure of it. I’ve – I’ve seen the way he looks at you. Truly, I could not be mistaken.’

The Countess drew a small sigh. ‘Thank you,’ she said, and then, ‘Thank you for letting me talk to you like this. You cannot know what a comfort it is to have a female companion again. Oh, Fräulein Hoffnung is a kind woman, but she is not a companion, and besides, she is Nikolasha’s, to the bottom of her heart, not impartial, like you.’ Anne said nothing. ‘I am so glad you have come to us, Anna Petrovna. Glad for Lolya, but more glad for me.’

Anne tried to crush the feelings down and speak evenly. Perhaps this was to be her punishment for the sins of thought she had committed, to be the friend and confidante of the woman she had wronged in her mind. ‘I have everything to thank you for, madame, You have been kind and generous to me,’ she said with an effort.

‘Please, call me Irina Pavlovna. But not when my mother- in-law is within hearing,’ she added with a faint smile. ‘Will you help me prepare for her visit? There will be a great deal to do. Vera Borisovna always expects everything to be up to Petersburg standards, even in the country. I suppose we will have to have a formal dinner and a ball.’

‘Will you not enjoy them? Dinners and balls are pleasant things,’ Anne said.

‘I hope only to survive. But you will enjoy them, I hope.’

‘When is she coming?’ Anne asked.

‘Next week, she and Sergei – and the Danilovs the day after, to stay until we leave for Petersburg. No more quiet rides alone,’ said the Countess sadly. ‘We shall have the house full for the rest of the summer. Oh, how I dislike to have lots of people around me. I hate company and crowds.’

How differently we feel, Anne thought. And how could the Count, that conversable, sociable man, have chosen such a retiring woman for his mate? Despite the kindness and the confidences, she still could not feel she liked the Countess, although she could not refuse the intimacy offered.

‘The rain seems to have stopped,’ she said, cocking a head to listen. ‘I think perhaps we might be on our way.’ She stood up, feeling the now lukewarm water rushing down to the toes of her boots, and her heavy skirts clutching damply at her legs. But at least their jackets were almost dry. They put them on, and thanked the peasant family for their hospitality, and received shy smiles from the woman, though the old man looked to Anne as though he would have liked a more tangible sort of gratitude.

‘When we get home,’ Anne added, following her mistress to the door, ‘perhaps we can make a list of the things that have to be done. I shall be very glad to help you in any way I can.’ The Countess gave her a glance of burning gratitude. If I cannot love her, Anne thought, I can at least be kind to her: I must do no less. But how much I would have preferred it if she had never existed, poor creature.

Chapter Nine

If Anne thought the Countess was exaggerating about the amount of work involved in preparing for a visit by the Countess Dowager, she soon learned her mistake. Her experience so far of Russian servants was that they were an easy-going tribe, who liked to move about their tasks in a leisurely fashion, and were more often than not to be found lounging against something and chatting, much preferring to discuss work than actually to do it.

The very mention of Vera Borisovna changed all that, and sent them scurrying in all directions, bumping into each other, dropping things, and exploding into vehement arguments about who was impeding whom, and whose fault it would be if things weren’t ready. It seemed that the whole house had to be scoured and polished from top to bottom before the Dowager stepped over the threshold. Carpets were beaten, floors waxed, windows cleaned inside and out, every piece of china and porcelain washed and dried by two senior servants who set Anne’s teeth on edge by their inability to converse while they worked without waving their hands.

Every lustre in the great rooms had to be dismantled, and the individual crystal drops washed in vinegar and polished with soft cloths before being put together again and supplied with fresh candles. Silver, which had languished unnoticed and dull since the last formal dinner, was polished to midday brightness, and Grigorovitch justified Anne’s first assumption about his job by appearing with ladder and pots to touch up the paintwork inside the house wherever it was damaged, finger-marked or dingy.

The great dining-room was opened up, and the largest of the state bedchambers, which Vera Borisovna would expect to use, and more modest bedrooms were prepared for the other guests. Gardeners came and went, followed by cursing housemaids with brooms, bringing pots of flowering plants and shrubs to decorate the formal rooms, orange trees in lead troughs to place along the terrace, and cut flowers for the Dowager’s chamber. The estate musicians were brought together and given their instructions, and the sound of their rehearsal issued at all hours from one of the rooms in the white tower; while down in the kitchens, such pandemonium reigned that the anthill activity upstairs paled into insignificance beside it.

The Countess went about with her face creased in a worried frown, the list she and Anne had made between them clutched like a talisman in her fingers and growing more and more dog-eared and difficult to read. Fräulein Hoffnung took charge of the children, to release Anne to help the Countess, and Nyanka to oversee the linen cupboard, which was her special province; but Lolya grew more ungovernable by the hour, and with Natasha at her heels, continually escaped Fräulein Hoffnung’s restraint to tear up and down corridors, toboggan down the newly polished stairs, and play hide-and-seek among the dust sheets.

The Count stepped serenely over and around the commotion with a smile of inward amusement, and, sitting down to the picnic meals which appeared at irregular intervals, told his wife that he couldn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss. ‘The servants ought to know their jobs by now. It’s only a matter of cleaning everything and setting it all to rights. Let them get on with it, Irina – don’t trouble yourself with it. Go out for a walk, or go and read a book somewhere.’

Irina forbore to point out that there was nowhere in the house where one could sit down with a book without being dusted, and ate her cold meat and stale bread with a meekness Anne would not have emulated. The Count’s attitude certainly made her want to wring his neck – it was not he who would be blamed if everything were not perfect – but on the other hand, the Countess was ineffectual and inefficient, often increasing muddles by her attempts to direct the servants’ labours and by her inability to make decisions and stick to them. Anne tried as far as possible to direct matters herself and to persuade the servants, without appearing disloyal, to come to her for instructions. Her Russian improved by bounds during the week before Vera Borisovna’s visit.

Then the dreaded day arrived, and all the servants were assembled in the great hall in clean dresses and aprons, best livery and white gloves, because the Dowager liked to be received in formal manner by the whole household. It was difficult to keep them all together, for individuals kept remembering something they hadn’t done, and slipping off to turn off a tap or retrieve a duster left in a prominent place. Vasky went along the line inspecting everyone’s fingernails, while Yakob, in a last-minute fit of panic, suddenly took it into his head to climb on to one of the hall chairs and check that the tops of all the doors had been dusted.

The children, washed to smarting-point and dressed in their best, were confined with Fräulein Hoffnung in one of the parlours off the great hall, ready to be brought out when the moment arrived. Anne and Nyanka were checking for a last time that everything was ready in the bedchambers, and that Lolya hadn’t done anything in her excitement like putting a frog in Vera Borisovna’s bed. Outside in the entrance courtyard the orchestra was tuning up for the moment when the carriages would come into sight, and the grooms were lined up round the walls to run to the horses’ heads. Anne thought that if the Prince of Wales had taken it into his head to go and stay with the Murrays for a week or two, there would not have been more fuss and work and worry than had been expended over the impending visit of the Dowager Countess Kirova.

When she arrived, however, she did it in grand style, in a large and gleaming black coach picked out with crimson and gilding, drawn by four milk-white horses. Behind it came two more carriages and a cart, bringing her servants and luggage, for where Vera Borisovna went, a nucleus household went too. She brought with her her waiting woman and her dresser, a chambermaid to take care of her linen, and a chamberlain who took charge of her china and silver, and who also looked after her jewels; a secretary-courier, for she could neither read nor write; her own coachman and footman, two grooms, a cook, two housemaids, and a lamp boy. In her youth, she had been lady-in-waiting to the great Empress Catherine, and she had never forgotten what that lady had taught her about the importance of ceremony. She also had her generation’s fear of the hazards of travelling, and was convinced that anywhere outside Moscow and Petersburg she would meet with nothing but insolent servants, damp sheets, bad food and cracked china.

Anne’s first view of her was not a disappointment. She had been prepared to be impressed, even if only because a woman who believes herself to be impressive will usually manage to be so, but Vera Borisovna was the, mistress of the grand entrance. She halted in the doorway, with the sound of the orchestra drifting in behind her, and her crowd of retainers just visible beyond her, and stood, head up, to be viewed.

She was not a tall woman, but she was large – not fat, precisely, more bulky and hard-looking – and she looked larger by virtue of her clothes. She wore a voluminous pelisse of royal-blue velvet, trimmed with dangling squirrel-tails, and, despite the summer heat, an enormous round hat of dark fur decorated with a diamond spray. Her arms were encased to the elbow in soft suede gloves of sky blue, the wrists clasped by diamond bracelets, and she held in one arm a goggle-eyed Chinese dragon-dog, pure white and sporting a diamond collar. In her other hand she carried a large, jewel-encrusted lorgnon, which she opened with a practised flick and used to subdue anyone not completely undone by her entrance.

Her face was long, like the Count’s, but the jaw was more pronounced and the nose less shapely. She had grey-green eyes, rather protuberant, even without the magnifying effect of the lorgnon, and a sharply down-turned mouth. Her whole expression was one of haughtiness and readiness to be displeased. A woman of no particular talent or mental attainment, she had early learnt that one sure way to avoid the charge of mediocrity was to become famous for ill-humour; Anne could well understand the Countess’s apprehension. For the moment, however, having surveyed the room, the Dowager put down the dog, stitched a terrifying smile into place, flung out her arms, and cried, ‘Koko!’ in a voice so vibrant that she managed to infuse five inflections into the one short word.

The Count, so designated, stepped forward and kissed both cheeks. ‘Mother dear,’ he said. ‘You’re looking well.’

‘Koko, mon cher fils.’ The Dowager advanced her head without moving her body, like a tortoise, to receive the greeting. ‘It has been such a time – such a disagreeable time – since we met! You have been away far too long, you wicked boy. What can there be in Europe to keep you from home?’

‘The Emperor’s business, Mama,’ the Count said mildly, and looked towards his wife. Thus prompted, she stepped forward dutifully, looking as blank and beautiful as if she had no fear in the world, and curtseyed to the dragon.

‘Ah, Irina Pavlovna,’ the Dowager said, as if she had only just managed to remember the name at the last moment. As the young Countess rose, the old one placed her hands on her arms and kissed the air over each shoulder, with a smile that made Anne want to scratch and spit. ‘How very – exotic you look, ma chère! And what an unusual gown! But you always do manage to wear something surprising. How lucky you are, Koko,’ she went on, her voice creaking with acerbity, ‘to have a wife with such imagination.’ Imagination, it was clear from her expression, was an attribute more usually to be found in criminals and lunatics.

‘Fräulein Hoffnung, you know of course,’ the Count went on, apparently unaware of these undercurrents.

‘Of course. How are you dear Fräulein Hoffnung?’ Vera Borisovna cried with so marked a warmth in comparison with her greeting of her daughter-in-law, that Anne thought the Count must surely notice it. She smiled sweetly, and the Fräulein’s cheeks grew pink.

‘Very well, thank you, madame,’ she said, her eyes bright with gratitude at the attention.

‘How is your old trouble? Better? Ah, but not worse I hope? We must have a long talk together, as soon as I have settled myself.’

‘And here,’ the Count went on, ‘is a new addition to our household, Mama: Miss Anne Peters, who has kindly consented to teach our little Yelena.’

The smile snapped off, and Vera Borisovna raised her lorgnon to look at Anne, and did not, it seemed, much care for what she saw. Anne curtseyed as slightly as she thought she could get away with. The Dowager made no sign of acknowledgement, and said rudely to her son, as if Anne were not present, ‘What sort of a name is that? Is she English? An English governess?’

‘Yes, Mama. Anne Peters is an English name,’ the Count said with patient humour. ‘But we call her Anna Petrovna.’

Vera Borisovna stared at Anne offensively through the lorgnon.

‘Why?’ she demanded coldly.

Anne caught the Count’s eye over her shoulder, and had to bite her lip to prevent herself from laughing.

‘Never mind, Mama,’ the Count said hastily, laying a hand on her arm and turning her away. ‘Come, let Vasky take your coat. The children are waiting to be presented to you. And where is Sergei? Don’t tell me you left him behind in Moscow?’

‘I was obliged to,’ the Dowager said, successfully diverted. ‘It is impossible to travel in the same carriage with him. The child cannot sit still for a moment. I don’t know what they teach them at school nowadays. I’m sure when you were his age, you were not so wild. But Alexandra’s children are just the same. She hasn’t the way of managing them. I left him with her to travel in her carriage.’

Vasky came forward with the bread and salt. The Dowager nodded it away, and then waved a hand for her own people to help her off with her hat, pelisse and gloves. Thus divested, she stood forth in a gown of puce silk, an elaborately arranged head of grey curls, complete with false-front in the style of twenty years before, a surprising quantity of pink powder and rouge, and a great many glittering jewels, including the diamond bracelets, several rings on each hand, and a massive necklace of rubies and diamonds with matching earrings.

The Count escorted her into the octagon room and placed her on a sofa with the little dog beside her, where she sat looking about her with sharply critical eyes. ‘Well, Irina Pavlovna, you have not seen fit to move that table, as I suggested to you the last time I was here,’ she began. ‘No doubt you had your reasons for leaving it in the very spot where the sunlight will strike it and take all the colour out of it. And the pictures are crooked. When the servants dust them, they must make sure they are hanging straight afterwards. It is precisely attention to such details that mark out the mistress of the house who is worthy of the name, from one who merely enjoys the privileges of the position.’

Irina bore all this with a pallid, ‘Yes, Belle-mère,’ while Anne longed for the distraction of the arrival of the children, whom Fräulein Hoffnung had gone to fetch. When at last they came into the drawing-room, Yelena pulled free at once, and ran eagerly forward crying, ‘Gran’mère, Gran’mère, here I am! Oh, you’ve got your rubies on! I like them best of all. Did you put them on for me?’

To Anne’s astonishment, the Dowager did not in the least object to the familiarity. A smile, which seemed in danger of cracking something, transformed the enamelled visage, and she held out both hands and said, ‘Ma Belle Hélène! Come here, my love, and let me see how you’ve grown! Oh, you have such a look of your dear mother about you! I’m sure you are lovelier every time I see you. Kiss your grandmother, my precious.’

Yelena did so noisily but briefly, and then repeated the salute on the dog. ‘Darling Nu-nu! I like his pretty collar, Gran’mère. It’s just like the one you wore with your grey dress at New Year. Where’s Seryosha? Did you bring me a present?’

‘Your French accent has improved a great deal, Hélène. Is that dear Fräulein Hoffnung’s work?’ the Dowager cooed, reaching for her reticule. Yelena, who had taken up a position leaning on the arm of the sofa with her elbows, rocked her feet off the floor and down again rhythmically as she watched the hand in the reticule with avaricious eyes.

‘No, Anna Petrovna teaches me French now,’ she said. ‘Is my present in there? What did you bring me?’ The Dowager had brought out a pretty gold cachoux-box with an enamelled lid and tiny diamonds round the edge, doubtless intending to take a cachou for herself, but Yelena said, ‘Oh, it’s so pretty, Gran’mère! Is it really for me?’

To Anne’s surprise the Dowager, with hardly a hesitation, said, ‘Do you like it? Yes, dear, it’s for you. Here–’ Her hands lingered only a little regretfully on it as she relinquished it into Yelena’s eager fingers. ‘Take good care of it, won’t you, ma chère p’tite, because it belonged to the poor dear martyred Queen of France.’ Yelena bent her head over it with close interest, and the Dowager turned a less hostile eye on Anne, and lifted her lorgnon only half-way as she said, ‘So, you teach my granddaughter French, mademoiselle?’

‘Yes, madame. That is, I improve her French, for she speaks it very fluently already,’ Anne said diplomatically.

The Dowager lowered the glass a little more. ‘Hmm,’ she said grudgingly. ‘You have a good accent, mademoiselle. English? I would not have thought it.’ She pulled herself together, and turned to frown at Irina. ‘There is no call to learn English as far as I can see. It was never required in my day, and what use will it be to Hélène? French is the language for a gentlewoman, French and only French. I’m surprised at you, my dear.’

Fräulein Hoffnung, anxious to protect her young mistress, now made a mistake. She had been holding Natasha by the hand all this time, and now, to draw attention away from the Countess, said, ‘Dear madame, here is your other granddaughter, come to greet you. Natasha Nikolayevna, curtsey to your grandmother.’

Vera Borisovna’s head swung round and her eyes narrowed, and she looked so coldly at the elderly governess that the poor Fräulein turned quite pale, dropped Natasha’s hand, and fumbled in her sleeve for a handkerchief which she pressed to her face as though hoping to hide in it. Natasha curtseyed quite prettily, but the Dowager stared, unmoved. ‘Yes, so I see.’ Then she looked at Irina Pavlovna and said frostily, ‘She looks like her mother.’

The words themselves were unexceptionable, but the tone of voice suggested that it was a grave misfortune for the child, and Irina Pavlovna’s lips quivered with distress. She held out her hand to her daughter, who ran to her, unconcerned, and climbed on to her lap. Anne could see how hurt she was, and also how the Count had – at least apparently – noticed nothing untoward in the exchange. Fortunately Yelena broke the tension by asking again after her brother, and the moment passed.

The Dowager, to mark her disapproval of Fräulein Hoffnung’s blunder in asking her to notice Natasha, decided to be gracious to Anne, invited her to take a seat near her and engaged her in conversation about Yelena’s education, beauty and amazing talents. She referred to her granddaughter always in the French form, Hélène, and lavished praise on her in her hearing in a way Anne thought calculated to make her own life more difficult in future. A conversation with the Dowager was ike a stroll under shell-fire, but it was obviously better to be one of Vera Borisovna’s favourites than one of her anathemas, so she picked her way carefully, answered patiently, and closed her mind to the Dowager’s offensive manner and her insulting opinions. It astonished her, then and on reflection, how the Count could have grown up so intelligent, liberal and kind, and even more how he could now be so blind to his mother’s multiple faults.

The following day, the Danilovs arrived, bringing Sergei with them. The Count’s sister, Alexandra, whom everyone but her mother called Shoora, was a round-faced, sweet-tempered, merry romp of a woman, seeming much younger than her age and certainly too young to be the mother of her two children. She didn’t look in the least like the Count, so Anne assumed she must favour her father. She had a frank, open face and round blue eyes, and when Anne was introduced, she took hold of both her hands and said, ‘Ah, you poor dear! How dreadful it must be to have no family and to be so far from home. Well, we shall be your family now. You must look on me as a sister, and you shall call me Shoora – none of this “madame” business. And how sensible of Nikolasha to give you a Russian name! It makes you seem like one of the family. You must come and stay with us in Moscow as soon as Irina can spare you, mustn’t she, Vsevka?’

Her husband, Vsevolod, was less voluble, but equally kind. He shook Anne’s hand, gave her a steady, friendly look, and said, ‘Yes, of course you must. You mustn’t miss seeing Moscow. It knocks Petersburg into a cocked hat!’

Their children, Ivan – Vanya – who was twelve, and Kira, who was ten, were remarkably attractive children, with the free, open manners of their parents, and a good deal of fun about them. Kira, indeed, was so pretty, with neat, regular features and a mischievous smile, that if she hadn’t been one of Vera Borisovna’s grandchildren, the Dowager would have given her a very uncomfortable time. Shoora and Vsevka treated the Dowager just as they treated everyone else and were impervious to her criticisms, shrugging them off with a laugh; and she was a good deal less formal and frosty with them. It went to prove, Anne thought, that the one thing one should never do with a bully is to lie down under their feet. But it was impossible, of course, to tell the Countess that.

The Count’s son, Sergei, was very like his father in looks, quite startlingly so, in fact. He was almost fifteen, and in the borderland between boyhood and manhood, capable of romping unselfconsciously with his sisters and cousins, but with the occasional painful access of dignity. He liked to talk seriously with his father and Uncle Vsevka about politics and military matters, standing with his hands clasped behind him, nodding sagely in a way that made Anne and the Count catch each other’s eye and repress a smile; and yet the next moment he would be in the throes of a very childish bout of horseplay with Vanya and Lolya, involving battering each other with cushions until they fell to the ground breathless.

His grandmother obviously adored him even more extravagantly than Yelena, and he bore her attentions patiently. The only time he rebelled was when she called him ‘Serge’ instead of Sergei or Seryosha. Then the high colour of youth in his cheeks would deepen with embarrassment and annoyance, and he would say ‘Don’t. That’s not my name.’ All the children called her Grandmère.. She spoke nothing but French, and would understand no other language, and they would not have dared address her as Baboushka, even had anything in her resembled that comfortable word.

Sergei treated Anne with friendly deference, as an unobjectionable adult outside his immediate circle of concern, which was all she would have expected of him. His attitude to his step-mother was harder to define. He was perfectly polite to her, and Anne, though she watched him closely, could not detect any hostility in his attitude; yet he was not at ease. He seemed to want to get away from her, answering her briefly when she spoke to him and never meeting her eye. He seemed to become subdued in her presence, as if the outflowing of his young spirits were suddenly damped down. He seemed almost to become smaller when he was near her.

The visitors settled in, and the house was filled with sound and movement, talk and laughter, which Anne found delightful. Shoora was a great asset to the company. She was full of fun and chatter, keeping the conversation going through every awkwardness and deflecting the Dowager’s malice from the Countess. With her brother’s help, she organised games and frolics in the evenings that kept everyone amused until the children fell asleep, despite themselves, from sheer exhaustion.

Anne liked her enormously and was glad that Shoora seemed equally disposed to approve of her. They had a long talk one morning in the linen cupboard, where they had gone to find some particular embroidered sheets which Vera Borisovna remembered having used on her bed on some previous visit.

‘Of course, Mama is very down on poor Irusha,’ Shoora said, leaning an elbow on a convenient shelf. ‘She didn’t think Nikolasha ought to have married again, and then when they had another child – well, that was the end of it! Nikolasha’s estate has to be divided up between his children, you see – when he dies, I mean of course – and the more children he has, the less there will be for Seryosha. Lolya has money in trust from her mother, so Mama isn’t worried about her. And Irusha’s young, and there’s no knowing how many more children they’ll have, so of course Mama takes it out on her.’

‘That’s very unfortunate,’ Anne said.

‘Very unfair, you mean,’ Shoora said with an impish grin. ‘It’s all right, you needn’t mind saying it to me. Well, Mama did read Nikolasha a terrible sermon when he married, saying he was selfish and irresponsible and all that sort of thing; so she blamed him as well as Irusha, but he doesn’t mind, while it really upsets her. If only she’d stand up to Mama, it wouldn’t be so bad. The worst thing you can do with Mama is to let her see you’re afraid of her.’

Anne could hardly say that was just what she had thought, so she just nodded.

‘And Nikolasha made it as bad as he could by telling Mama he was in love. Mama chose his first wife for him, and as far as she was concerned Yelena Vassilovna was absolutely perfect. To her mind, Nikolasha should have buried his heart along with his wife, especially as he already had a son to follow him. She thought it was in bad taste to marry again, and then to marry for love, and to a woman of no family, and with no dowry. And then, Irusha’s from the Caucasus, which Mama regards as practically Turkey.’

‘I see. She hadn’t much hope of winning approval, then,’ Anne said.

‘She might have been all right, if she’d been richer, or much plainer than Yelena Vassilovna, or if she’d even managed to be a Frenchwoman,’ Shoora sighed. ‘But as it is, she’s done everything wrong, poor creature. Ah, wait, are those the ones? Oh no, they’re the lace-edged sheets Vsevka and I gave for the wedding. Well, I don’t know where these embroidered ones are. I think Mama must have dreamt them.’ She looked at Anne with a frank smile. ‘I like you, Anna. I think you will be very good for Irina. And good for Nikolasha, too.’

‘What do you mean?’ Anne asked with difficulty.

Shoora’s round blue eyes were fixed on her face. ‘Oh, give him someone to talk to, I mean. You’re of his kind, a real intellectual. I’m not, and poor Vsevka knows about nothing but bang-bangs, and Irusha, poor child, is as cloudy as pond-water. But you can really talk to him. He needs that. His poor mind gets like a hunter shut up in a stable and fed too much corn. We should all count it a great service, Anna dear, if you’d give him a little exercise from time to time. What a pity,’ she added with a sigh, ‘that he couldn’t have married someone like you. I’m sure you could have made him happy, and made Mama like you.’

Anne fought to keep her countenance and hoped that the colour of her cheeks might be attributed to the warmth in the closet. ‘I think we ought to give up the search for those sheets,’ she said ‘I don’t think we’re going to find them.’

‘I’m sure we won’t,’ Shoora said equably. ‘I’d have taken Nyanka’s word for it – she ought to know, after all – but Mama never trusts servants, and especially not Georgians. She thinks they all live in caves and eat little children.’

All meals were now formal occasions, taken in the great dining room, and with the best crystal, silver, and china. The breakfast- set was Meissen, patterned with brightly coloured insects, butterflies and dragonflies; the dinner service was newer, Sèvres famille vert with a deep gold border. All the children sat down with the adults, and Anne was impressed with the way they handled the priceless articles – the exquisite porcelain, the delicate crystal, the heavy silver cutlery – and never spilled or dropped anything. There was a liveried footman to each chair – Vera Borisovna’s own footman waited on her, his scarlet livery clashing horribly with the Kirov strawberry red – and Vasky attended to the wines, while Yakob, quivering with nervousness, presided over the side board and dressed the joints. There were two full courses every evening, and dinner often went on until half past eight or nine o’clock.

The neighbouring families all made formal calls to pay their respects to the Dowager, and on most days there were guests to dinner, or to cards and supper. Vera Borisovna was a great card-player, and in the style of her youth, played for high stakes and was usually a winner. These occasions were a refined torture for the Countess, who, though understanding the rules of play, had no more grasp of strategy than a bullfinch. She lost every hand, and though the Count paid her losses cheerfully, even jokingly, she could not but be aware of her mother-in-law’s contempt. Even worse was when the draw partnered them: either they lost, and the Dowager abused her stupidity, or they won, and she was placed in the Dowager’s moral debt.

The Countess’s only moments of happiness were when she rode out, usually now in the company of Shoora and the children, and sometimes the young people from the neighbouring families. Vera Borisovna did not ride and so for a few hours the Countess could legitimately avoid her company. The weeks passed, and though there had been informal dinners and various evening entertainments, nothing had yet been said about a formal dinner or ball. Anne was aware that the Countess was evading the issue; and was aware, too, from covert glances and pointed remarks, that a subtle pressure was being exerted by the Dowager for a date to be set. It was plain that for the Countess, to give a formal reception would be worse torture than not to. Anne was only surprised that she managed, with that stubbornness weak people sometimes display, to continue to resist.

One morning while they were at breakfast, Vasky brought in a pile of stiff white cards together with a letter for the Countess.

‘Invitations!’ Shoora exclaimed at once. ‘Don’t tell me – nothing else looks like an invitation card. How exciting! Who is it, Irusha? Dinner or ball?’

‘It’s from Princess Kovanina,’ Irina said, reading her letter. ‘They have just arrived from Petersburg, and ask us to a formal dinner and ball at Grubetskaya next week, especially in your honour, Belle-mire.’

Anne saw Vera Borisovna cast a sharp glance at the Countess. This might well be used as an excuse for Irina not to give a ball of her own, especially as the summer was now well advanced. Yet from her expression, she might as well have been invited for a short spell of imprisonment followed by execution by guillotine, and Anne felt a faint irritation with her mistress that she seemed so incapable of enjoying life.

She was thrilled, however, to find that there was an invitation for her in the pile of thick, gold-edged cards, and after breakfast Shoora hastened to tell her how much she would enjoy it.

‘Grubetskaya’s a beautiful house, not like this dreadful old pile – just like Versailles, only not so big, of course, but with a beautiful ballroom, all mirrors, and a terrace overlooking the river. The Kovanins are wonderful hosts, quite young, and not a bit stuffy. Nikolasha says the Poliakovs probably told them about you. Have you something to wear, by the way?’ she added.

‘The grey crepe is my best dress,’ Anne said. ‘The one I wore at dinner last night.’

‘Oh, no, it’s too severe, and cut too high,’ Shoora protested. ‘Besides, it’s not really a ball-gown. She should have something much younger and prettier to dance in, shouldn’t she, Irusha?’ she added as her sister-in-law came in. ‘You aren’t required to dress like Fräulein Hoffnung, you know! You could have one of my gowns to make over, if you like, only they would all go round you twice over, you’re so slender.’

‘No, no,’ Irina said calmly, ‘she must have something new. I have some very pretty figured muslin upstairs which I bought in Petersburg but never had made up. You shall have it to make yourself a new gown – something fashionable and pretty.’

‘Excellent! And I have some ladies’ journals you can look through. This gets better every moment,’ cried the irrepressible Shoora. ‘Just like dressing up a doll!’

Anne felt ridiculously excited. She was to go to a ball and a grand dinner, the guest of a Prince and Princess! She tried to tell herself that she should not care so much for such worldly pleasures, but she was only twenty-three, and her natural spirits bubbled up in her like champagne. To attend a ball in a new gown, to dance! Someone would surely ask her at some point in the evening, even if it were only kind Vsevka Danilov. She would have at least one dance – and what heaven to be at a ball, as a guest, in a new gown!

In her spare time during the next week, she laboured long and carefully over the new gown, and took it to Marya Petrovna to put in the rather ambitious finely stroked gathers she wanted for the sleeves. The material the Countess had so kindly given her was a fine Indian muslin, figured with raised, glossy white spots, and Anne had cut out a very simple but elegant gown, with a low neck, and short sleeves bound with white satin ribbon. She had unpicked the silk underskirt of her crèpe gown to go under the muslin, which was so fine that the dusky pink colour showed through rather prettily.

On the day of the ball, everyone went upstairs very early to dress, the timing being adjusted to Vera Borisovna’s lengthy requirements. Anne had little to do to prepare herself, and was dressed and ready within half an hour. She was sitting in her room reading, to pass the time, when there was a knock on the door, and the Countess’s maid Marie came in to say that her mistress had sent her to dress Anne’s hair. It was another example of her great kindness, and Anne sat before her looking-glass feeling a now familiar mixture of guilt and irritation over Irina Pavlovna’s character, as she watched the maid’s skilful fingers rearranging her hair. Marie brushed it until it shone, then curled it into ringlets and drew them up to the top of Anne’s head, bound them there in a bunch with pink ribbon and some white rosebuds, and then cut and curled her front hair.

‘C’est ainsi que Madame Josephine les porte, mademoiselle,’ Marie assured Anne when she had finished, and then stood back to regard the reflection critically. ‘Mais vous avez besoin de quelque chose – un collier, certainement, et des boucles d’oreille pour completer la toilette.’

Anne produced the pearl earrings that her father had given her, and Marie looked at them rather doubtfully, and handled them with the tips of her fingers.

‘They were my dear father’s last present to me,’ Anne said firmly.

Marie sighed and put them on for her and said bravely, ‘On voit qu’elles sont assez jolies, enfin, pour une demoiselle.’ However, when it appeared that the only thing Anne could offer by way of necklace was a simple gold chain, she rebelled firmly and finally, and scurried off to consult with her mistress.

A little while later, in spite of all her protests, Anne was obliged to accept from the Countess the loan of a handsome necklace of three strands of pearls clasped at the front with a ruby, and a pair of coral and pearl bracelets. Anne was reluctant to wear borrowed jewels, and insisted that she was perfectly happy with her own modest things. The Countess, seated before her mirror with a worried frown, was obliged at last to turn round to impress Anne with the urgency of the matter.

‘Please, for my sake, do wear them! You will not be formal enough without, and Vera Borisovna will take exception if everything is not just so. You really ought to have something better than those, but I chose them because they will go with your father’s earrings, which you were so anxious to wear.’

Anne had no wish to increase her mistress’s burdens, and with this veiled threat of more costly jewels, accepted with as much grace as she could and made her way down to the octagon room to wait for the hour of the carriages. Vsevka and the Count were there, chatting. Both stood as she entered, but Anne’s eyes were for the Count alone. In evening dress, powdered, with a glittering ribbon and star across his chest, he looked so handsome and noble that her heart skipped like a roe, and she would have found it impossible, if challenged, to say anything about Vsevka’s appearance, or even what colour his coat was.

She walked a few steps into the room and stopped, looking at him almost shyly, like a child in her first grown-up dress waiting for approval. He looked at her, and with a whimsical gesture of one hand, he bid her turn around to be viewed.

‘So that’s the new gown,’ he said at last. ‘Yes, it will do very well. I thought at first it was too plain, but after all there is a kind of simplicity, which is very agreeable. I still think,’ he added with a smile to remind her of the other ball, ‘that you should have diamonds, Anna Petrovna. But at least I shan’t have to ask anyone’s permission to dance with you.’

‘No one’s but hers,’ Vsevka commented drily. ‘You have no manners, Nicky! I’ll show you how it’s done. Anna Petrovna, will you do me the inestimable honour of reserving a dance for me tonight?’

Anne tore her eyes from the Count for long enough to smile at Vsevka’s low bow, and say, ‘Yes – thank you – with pleasure. You are very kind, sir.’

‘No, you are kind, mademoiselle. And now, since Nikolasha seems to have been struck dumb, come and sit here by me, and let me pour you a glass of wine. The others will be hours yet. I don’t know what women take so long about up there! I mean, look at you: you have done everything a woman needs to appear ravishing, and you’re still ready at a reasonable hour.’

Anne could have wished Vsevka anywhere but here, as he obliged her to sit down and chatted pleasantly, destroying what she had seen as a tender moment between her and the Count with his commonplace kindness. But perhaps, she reflected a while later, he had been doing it for her sake: perhaps she had been wearing rather too much of her feelings on her face. When the other ladies finally arrived, she was able to greet them with complete composure, and even endured, unmoved, a long and searching examination through the lorgnon by Vera Borisovna, who, in a parure of pink diamonds and amethysts the size of plover’s eggs, was as splendid and glittering and gem-encrusted as an Indian potentate – which, with her sallow complexion and jewel-clasped turban, she even rather resembled.

In the long, pillared and gilded drawing-room at Grubetskaya, the dinner guests assembled: the women deeply décolletée, all bare arms and bosoms, and more jewels than an English lady would have thought quite the thing; the men in silk breeches and stockings, velvet or satin coats, ribbons and stars and orders, dress swords, powdered hair. There was something rather engaging about the evident delight everyone had in dressing-up, even for what Anne had been assured was not the most formal of occasions, and the overt pleasure with which they wore their princes’ ransoms of jewels.

Anne was introduced to the Kovanins: the Princess plump and golden-haired, with a short upper lip and a merry smile that reminded Anne of Kira’s, and the Prince very small and dark and slightly bow-legged, rather frog-like, and very knowledgeable about horses. Both welcomed her kindly.

The Tiranovs were there, and the Fralovskys, and all four Tchaikovskys arrived shortly afterwards. Olga, her black curls piled high, was the only other woman all in white, like Anne; but unlike Anne she was sparkling with crystal spars and diamonds, like an ice-queen. Her brother Basil, his dark face seeming darker against his powdered hair, claimed Anne, surprisingly, as an old acquaintance. He bowed lower than ever over her décolletage and spoke quite pleasantly about Paris and London and the difference between public and private balls, with the pleasant assumption that Anne would have attended enough of them to have an opinion.

When everyone had been assembled for some time, chatting, the doors were flung open, and footmen wheeled in several long tables covered in white cloths, on which a large number of silver dishes were arranged. Vsevka, who was standing beside Anne at that moment, intercepted her look of enquiry and explained, ‘It’s called zakuska – different sorts of small things to eat, which we have before dinner begins, to whet the appetite.’

The tables had been set up at one end of the room like buffets, with the footmen standing behind them ready to serve, and people were beginning to move towards them. Prince Kovanin offered Vera Borisovna his arm, and the Count escorted Princess Kovanina. Anne had the impression that Basil Tchaikovsky was about to offer her his arm when his sister thrust her hand under his elbow and pulled him away, saying, ‘I must go with you, mon cher. It is bad enough that we shall be separated at dinner, for there is no one else here fit to talk to.’

Vsevka smiled kindly down at Anne. ‘Will you do me the honour of taking my arm, Miss Anna? I’ll tell you what everything is, and make sure you taste everything you ought.’

‘Yes, gladly,’ Anne said. Later, learning to balance a plate and glass and still to manipulate a fork, she reflected that it was a strange way of eating. The footmen helped each person to a selection from the dishes, some of which were hot and set over chafing-dishes, and others cold, and the guests stood about in groups, plate in hand, talking and laughing as they ate, and returning to the buffet to replenish.

With Vsevka, genial and amused, to help her, Anne went a fair way to trying everything. There was caviar, grey and unappetising to look at, but quite delicious; various kinds of salt fish; strips of smoked duck and of smoked chicken rolled about olives; and slices of spicy sausage like little marbled coat buttons. There were tiny tartlets, filled with creamed chicken, with buttered egg, with fillets of anchovy in a savoury paste; there were hot dishes of stewed prawns and stuffed eggs and pickled mushrooms; there were hearts of artichokes, radishes, and a dozen different kinds of cheese.

Every time Anne was about to discover what the pattern was on her exquisite porcelain plate, it was taken out of her hand and a new selection of delicacies appeared, while her glass never seemed to have a chance of becoming empty. There was vodka to drink, from the Count’s own distillery, but of a finer brew than what was sold in the peasant kabaks, she was assured by Vsevka; and champagne, both kept chilled in great wooden coolers full of ice. It was well, Anne thought, looking around the room at the munching, laughing company, that she had not eaten that day since breakfast, or this extensive preliminary feast would have spoiled, rather than whet, the appetite for what was to come.

It was well after six o’clock when the Prince and Princess led the way into the huge dining-room for dinner, and ten o’clock before any of them set foot in the ballroom, where the orchestra, on a raised dais at one end, was playing quietly to itself as if to pass the time. Anne had never been at Versailles nor seen a picture of it, so she did not know whether the comparison were just, but the ballroom at Grubetskaya was the most beautiful and magnificent room she had ever seen. It was about a hundred feet long and thirty feet high, with three of the walls entirely covered with gilt-framed mirrors, interspersed with gilded, three-branched sconces. From these and from the huge crystal lustres, the light of hundreds of candles was reflected in the mirrors to dazzling effect.

The fourth wall was pierced all along with pairs of glass doors leading out on to the terrace, a broad, marble-paved walk, set here and there with flowering shrubs and ornamental trees in pots, and a stone balustrade, beyond which was a sheer drop of thirty feet to the river, from whose far bank rose up beautiful hanging woods. The whole scene was reflected in the mirrored walls, so that, as the ballroom filled with guests, it seemed to hang suspended in a vast space like a gold and crystal box filled with jewels and flowers.

Anne found she did not need the kindness of Vsevka to ensure that she danced. He claimed the first dance with her, but when it was over, young Boris Tiranov came up to ask her, and after that she never lacked a partner. Russians, she discovered, from the youngest to the oldest, loved to dance, so there was no fear that anyone would languish against the wall. She danced the third with Borya’s grandfather, old Admiral Tiranov, who, like the Count, claimed to have met her father, but could give no clear account of when or where; and when pressed, admitted with a twinkling eye that it might have been Admiral Parker, not Admiral Peters, but that it was a good enough excuse to talk to her.

Half a dozen partners later, Borya’s brother Pavel came and bowed to her, only to be gently but firmly brushed aside by Basil Tchaikovsky, who said, ‘You Tiranovs can’t expect to monopolise mademoiselle all night. Wait your turn, young Pavelasha! She is promised to me since before dinner – you may have her next, perhaps.’ And before Anne could have any say in the matter herself, she was swept away into the set.

Facing her partner a little stiffly, she said, ‘Do you always dispense with the ceremony of asking, before claiming a partner, sir?’

‘Now, mademoiselle, don’t poker up with me!’ he returned, completely unabashed. ‘You know quite well I meant to ask you at zakuska, only I couldn’t get near you.’ He smiled vividly at her, displaying his white teeth, a feature for which he was famed. It was to emphasise their whiteness that he had grown a narrow black moustache like a Frenchman, which Anne regarded with particular dislike.

‘How should I know it,’ she replied coolly, ‘when you made no attempt to ask me, or even to speak to me until this moment? Why should 1 suppose you had the least desire to dance with me?’

‘Every man in the room desires to dance with a pretty woman,’ he replied, leaning towards her, his eyes bulging softly. His upper eyelids, she noticed, were abnormally short, and for an instant she was absurdly afraid that they might fall out, and had an image of herself leaping forward nimbly to catch them. ‘Ah, that’s better,’ he said, watching her closely. ‘You almost smiled. You look so very pretty when you smile, mademoiselle.’

‘Absurd,’ she said. ‘I, pretty?’

‘Well, not just in the common style, perhaps,’ he said appraisingly, ‘but you have something, mademoiselle, I assure you; and my opinion is worth having. I am acknowledged as an expert on women. It was I, for instance, who brought La Karsevina to Moscow – and kept her there for a twelvemonth! Now there’s something about you, mademoiselle, something very fine and original, that shows in your face. Intelligence, too–’

‘Too much intelligence to take your nonsense seriously, I promise you,’ Anne said firmly.

He lifted his hands in a gesture of innocence. ‘Mademoiselle, I protest! I could make you the toast of Petersburg, if I took you up, you know. My opinion is much sought. You could have anyone you wanted.’ Anne was not really paying attention to him, and her eyes had involuntarily strayed to the next set, where the Count was dancing with the Princess. Basil followed the direction of her gaze and gave a shrug. ‘Kirov? No, no, I assure you, you are wrong.’ Anne looked at him, startled, and he showed his teeth again. ‘Kirov may have a very pretty woman for a wife, but he has not the power to make you fashionable, as I have. No one asks his opinion about women. About horses, yes; but everyone knows dear Vera Borisovna chooses his wives for him, and does it very well indeed.’

Anne could not prevent herself from laughing at the absurdity of his opinions. Was this the man Shoora had said was toasted as both handsome and clever? He had not even the penetration to see what Vera Borisovna really thought of her daughter-in-law. She laughed, and Basil took the compliment to himself.

‘You see how I amuse you? Dear mademoiselle, you and I go very well together. I think we shall see a great deal of each other in Petersburg.’

‘And what will your sister think of that?’ Anne asked unkindly.

‘My sister? What can you mean?’ he asked, his cheeks growing a little pink under their sallowness.

‘I mean, dear sir, that she is looking at us this moment, and to judge by her expression you will not be seeing anything of me in Petersburg.’

He looked hastily round, and then turned back to lean perilously over Anne, so that she began to think the eyes, if they did drop out, would fall down inside her bodice. ‘Dear mademoiselle, have no fear! I have not yet told her that your father was an admiral. All will be well, I assure you!’

And as Anne continued to laugh merrily at almost everything he said, he was well pleased with the beginning of his campaign, and was ever more impressed by her intelligence, which was demonstrated by her ready appreciation of his wit.

At the end of their dance, she curtseyed and escaped, and managed to slip through the crush to one of the doors to draw a breath of fresh air and let the last of her laughter shake itself free.

‘You seemed to be getting on very well with your last partner,’ murmured the Count into her ear. She looked round and found him standing at her shoulder, resting his hand on the door-frame above her head; and, looking up into his smiling face, felt a sense of peace and contentment stealing over her. His presence was all she had needed to make the evening perfect.

‘I found him vastly entertaining,’ she said.

‘Oh? Well, he is said to be a very charming young man,’ the Count said, observing the glint in her eye. ‘

“Charming young man” isn’t quite the description I would use.’

‘Really? What then?’

‘I think–’ she pretended to ponder. ‘Yes, I think “egregious ass” fits him rather better.’ The Count snorted with laughter. ‘Really, how can he have won such a reputation for wit? And his sister for beauty? Is she as like him in intellect as she is in looks?’

‘Another moment, Anna Petrovna, and I shall suspect you of being jealous. It doesn’t do to tilt at reputations, you know.’ He glanced over his shoulder. ‘Damn, here’s that young Tiranov boy, looking for you to dance with him, I don’t doubt. I’ve been waiting all evening to talk to you – he shan’t have you. Come, step outside with me for a moment. He hasn’t seen you yet.’

He stepped behind her to shield her from view and propelled her gently out on to the terrace, and then tucked her hand under his arm and strolled with her along the walk. Anne matched her steps to his, blissfully happy. He had sought her out – said he had been waiting all evening for her. She had nothing more to wish for.

‘So what was Basil Andreyevitch telling you that was so very amusing?’ he asked.

‘He said that if he took me up, he could make me the toast of Petersburg.’

‘Did he? Curse his impudence! What else?’

‘That you could not do it for me,’ Anne said, glancing up at him, ‘because your taste in horses was famous, but not in women.’

‘Ha!’ The Count’s mouth curled into its closed, cat-smile. ‘What else?’

‘That I was not handsome in the common style,’ she said, smiling now. They reached the end wall and stopped, and the Count felt in his pocket and took out a cigar.

‘Do you object to the smell?’ he asked.

‘No, I like it,’ she said. ‘I used to light Papa’s for him.’

He took a moment to cut his cigar, light it, and get it drawing. Then, blowing a plume of fragrant smoke high in the air, he turned to look at her, leaning on the balustrade and studying her with a humorous but intent look. ‘Well,’ he said at last, ‘egregious ass or not, he was not entirely mistaken.’

‘About what?’ Anne asked. She rested her forearm on the stone sill, and tilted her head back to look at him, and felt her throat tighten as she met his shining, laughing eyes.

‘He could make you the toast of Petersburg, for one thing. He has great influence amongst the young people of fashion. God knows why!’ He gave a bark of laughter. ‘But you should not dismiss him too lightly,’ he added seriously. ‘It would be a good thing for you – a great thing, perhaps.’

‘Why should I want to be a toast?’ Anne said dismissively.

‘Because, little sceptic, you might make a good marriage through his recommendation. You might marry someone of position and wealth, and be fixed for ever.’

‘I don’t want to marry,’ she said.

‘You say that now,’ he said, ‘but you may think differently one day.’

She shrugged. ‘And what else was he right about? That you couldn’t do as much for me?’

‘I would not,’ he said, and she flinched inwardly at the changed emphasis. ‘It wouldn’t be in my best interests’, he added quietly, ‘to help you leave my household, now would it?’

‘And what else?’ she asked unsteadily.

‘That you are not handsome in the common style,’ he said, looking at her searchingly now. ‘In fact, you are quite uncommonly beautiful, Annushka, only he is too much of an ass to see it.’ And he put out his hand, and brushed her cheek with the backs of his fingers. Anne felt as though the whole night were holding its breath in the fluttering silence that followed. ‘Don’t leave us too soon,’ he said at last. ‘I am selfish to ask it, but I should miss you very much if you left, even to marry someone as good and great as Basil Tchaikovsky.’

‘I don’t want to marry,’ she said again, but this time the words did not, perhaps fortunately, reach the air. After a moment, the Count turned to lean on the balustrade and look out across the river, drawing again on his cigar and blowing the haze-blue smoke into the luminous sky. Anne turned too, and leaned beside him, close enough to feel the warmth of his body against her bare arms, and they stood in companionable silence staring at the dark line where the trees curled against the sky. Presently the moon rose, and lifted itself above the trees to sail clear: a full moon, white and transparent as a lemon-drop.

Chapter Ten

In October, when the frosts came, riming the drifts of fallen leaves and blackening the late buds on the roses, the Kirovs left Schwartzenturm and went back to St Petersburg. The Danilovs took their departure too, for Moscow, taking Sergei with them, but the Dowager Countess decided to stay with her son and daughter-in-law for a while longer in order to visit old friends in Petersburg.

‘I might stay with you until Christmas, perhaps,’ she said, as though conferring a great favour. ‘I still have a large acquaintance at Court; and I ought to pay my respects to the dear Empress-Mother.’

At Schwartzenturm the double windows were fitted, the shutters put up, the furniture and lustres bagged in hollands, the carpets rolled, the plate and china packed carefully away. Only a skeleton staff would remain, living in the white tower, until the house was needed again. The rest of the indoor servants, along with the family and their luggage, made part of the huge cavalcade that set off for the short journey up the wide, bone-hard road to Petersburg.

Anne had heard so much about it already, this great city which Emperor Peter had raised, by an act of will and at the cost of thousands of peasant lives, from the swamps and salt-marshes and reed-covered islands of the Neva estuary at the northern end of the Bay of Finland .Not quite a hundred years later, Peter the Great’s ‘Window on the West’, begun in such unpromising conditions in one of the worst climates imaginable, had become ‘the Venice of the North’, and the most beautiful city in the world.

It was a city of broad avenues, gigantic squares, waterside promenades and massive granite quays lining both sides of the wide, genial river. With its interlinking network of canals, it was a city of light and movement and rippling reflections, bright-coloured boats and the chuckle of water against hull. It was a city of buildings designed on a magnificent scale: elegant, symmetrical, pillared and porticoed, and – what was most delightful to Anne’s first sight – stuccoed and painted in bright, harmonious colours. Every other city was dull and shabby in comparison. Where in the world, for instance, was there anything to equal the seemingly endless, blood-red façade of the rococo Winter Palace, or the chrome-yellow Admiralty building, almost a quarter of a mile long, with its gilded spire, its white columns and projecting porches flanked with marble statues?

The Kirov Palace on the Angliskaya Naberezhna – the English Quay – was painted a pale, bright blue, classical in style, with the windows, frieze, and pediment picked out in contrasting white. Anne was struck speechless with the sheer size of it. And when the Count told her it was one of the smaller palaces, she gave him a reproachful look.

‘But it’s true,’ he said, divining her trouble. ‘Everything in Petersburg is big, compared with European cities,’ he added almost apologetically. ‘You must remember that here in Russia, space is what we have plenty of. And particularly here at the mouth of the Neva, where the land was not useful for anything else.’

Anne’s new room was so large that at first she thought regretfully of her snug chamber at Schwartzenturm, particularly when she began at last to appreciate how cold it was going to be. There was no doubt though, that it was handsome. Her massive bed bore a canopy and curtains of ochre silk-damask; the drapes were of sea-green velvet, the carpet green-and-gold Savonnerie; the walls were panelled in a pale, honey-coloured wood, and the furniture was light and modern, with chairs upholstered in sea-green to match the drapes.

The fire in the massive marble fireplace, supported by rather snub-nosed caryatids, was kept alight all the time. It was flanked with two sofas, while nearby was a neat little satinwood writing-desk, positioned to catch the light. It was a room not only to sleep in, but to retire to at any time of the day, to be comfortable and private. As soon as Anne’s eye had adjusted to the difference of proportion of everything in Petersburg, she began to think of it as being just as snug as her room in Schwartzenturm.

The first few days were very pleasant, as the Kirovs devoted themselves to showing Anne the sights of Petersburg. The Dowager was engaged elsewhere, renewing old acquaintances, so it was a relaxed and happy Countess who introduced Anne to this magical city. Sometimes alone, and sometimes en famille, she took Anne to watch parades in front of the Winter Palace, reviews on the Champs de Mars, and impromptu carriage-races along the quaysides, and again and again to visit the shops along the Nevsky Prospekt, each like a little palace in its own right, where French fashions and furniture and the most fabulous jewels and furs in the world were on glittering display. The weather was cold but bright, and Petersburg looked at its best under a dark-blue autumn sky, the heatless sunshine flashing off the gold of spires and cupolas and refracting into dazzling rainbows in the spray from a hundred ornamental fountains.

Even when lessons began again, Anne found herself with more time to herself, for while in Petersburg, Lolya went to fashionable tutors for her music, dancing and drawing lessons. After a week or so, there was also another interruption: Vera Borisovna took to coming into the schoolroom at various times and taking Yelena away to accompany her on shopping expeditions or to visit friends. Anne guessed that the Dowager enjoyed the child’s uncritical company, and also that she liked to show her off to her contemporaries, for Yelena was certainly both pretty and vivacious. But it was bad for Lolya to be displayed like a pet monkey, praised and admired and generally allowed to go her length unchecked. The more Gran’mère called her Belle Hélène and promised her a career of social adulation and heart-breaking, the more idle and inattentive she became in the schoolroom.

Finally, Anne felt driven to remonstrate. It was difficult to find an opportunity to do so, for she would not argue with the grandmother in front of the child, and Vera Borisovna was largely engaged elsewhere in the evenings. The occasion arose, however, one day when Tanya had taken Lolya early to her dancing lesson, while the rest of the family was lingering over breakfast.

‘My sweet Hélène,’ Vera Borisovna was saying. Tve seen the most delightful ermine hat in the Pantheon bazaar! I have half a mind to buy it for her this afternoon before I take her to the Shuvalovs. Princess Shuvalova’s granddaughter is coming to visit her, and she’s as plain as a staff beside Hélène! And as for her playing on the pianoforte, well, I hardly know where to–’

‘I beg your pardon, madame,’ Anne interrupted, feeling her blood mount, ‘but do I understand that you are intending to take Yelena out of her lesson again?’

The Dowager’s brows contracted sharply, and the Countess choked a little over her coffee.

‘What is it to you, mademoiselle, if I do?’ the Dowager snapped. ‘Pray do not interrupt me when I am speaking.’

‘I must interrupt, madame, when it is a matter of Yelena’s welfare,’ Anne began bravely, hearing her own voice with a kind of detached amazement, for she was almost as frightened of the Dowager as the Countess was. ‘It is not good for her continually to miss her lessons–’

‘How dare you speak, mademoiselle, when I have bid you be silent?’ the Dowager said, her cheeks mottling ominously. ‘Remember your place!’

‘My place, madame, is to teach Yelena, and I cannot do so if you interfere with my–’

‘Interfere!’ the Dowager boomed in horrified astonishment. The Countess moaned quietly behind her napkin. ‘How dare you use such a word to me? Do you think I do not know what is good for my own granddaughter, my own flesh and blood, better than a foreigner, a hireling, engaged merely to teach her English, though what good that will do her I still have not been brought to understand? You see, Irina Pavlovna,’ she went on, rounding on the Countess with a sort of savage glee, ‘what comes of going against tradition? No gentlewoman speaks any language but French, as I’ve told you many times, and now this – this person–’

‘I was engaged, madame, as Yelena’s governess, to educate her in all subjects, not just English, and I will not remain silent when I see her being made vain and idle by a diet of flattery and spoiling,’ Anne cried, her face growing as red as the Dowager’s.

Vera Borisovna let out a shriek. ‘Insolence! You impudent hussy! Koko, dismiss this – this creature at once! Do you hear me, Koko? I want her out of the house within the hour! I will not have–’

‘Sir, I appeal to you,’ Anne said desperately over the top of the tirade. ‘You engaged me to make an educated woman of your daughter, and I cannot do so if–’

The Count stood up, and held up his hands. Both protagonists lapsed into silence, their eyes fixed on him in mute and burning appeal, and he surveyed them a moment with his most infuriating faint smile. The Countess looked from one face to another apprehensively, knowing that that particular smile boded no good.

‘Mother dear, consider! I can’t turn Anna off in a strange land, when it was I who brought her here. I have a responsibility towards her. I owe it to her father, my friend, to take care of her.’

‘Koko, you cannot mean–!’

‘Sir, you must know–’

‘Anna dear,’ the Count said soothingly, turning to her as he left the table, ‘don’t make such a fuss. There’s plenty of time to teach Lolya everything she needs to know. She’s only nine years old. Let her enjoy herself.’

With that he strolled out of the room, having resolved nothing, leaving the Dowager baffled and Anne annoyed but resigned. Irina got up hastily and made her escape, and for an instant Anne felt a sympathy with her mistress. The Count was many delightful things, but he was not perfect, and his enjoyment of teasing people could be very tiresome. But just as Lolya’s imperfections of face made her the more truly beautiful, his imperfections of character only made him more attractive to Anne.

One day when she was accompanying the Countess and the children in the carriage, Anne saw the Emperor Alexander from a short distance away. He was tall, well made, and handsome, with high-coloured cheeks, blue eyes, and dark auburn hair, looking very elegant on horseback in one of his many brightly coloured uniforms. She thought he looked pleasant and kindly, but very young, younger even than his twenty-six years. It was hard to reconcile his appearance with the fact that he was the absolute ruler of the largest country in the world. He was not just the sovereign, he was the owner of every man, woman and child, every acre of land, every cow, sheep, tree and ear of wheat in all of Russia, and he could do with them exactly as he wished.

Of course, Anne knew that only outsiders like her found it remarkable. To the native Russians it was as natural a state of affairs as that it should be cold in winter. And how cold! Anne had been told about the cold, had expected it, but no exercise of the intellect could prepare her for temperatures that passed freezing point and went on falling to the stark and astonishing regions of -21C.

It was a cold past comprehension, a cold like death, and yet there was a curious exhilaration in it, a feeling of the city gradually waking up. First the river skimmed over with ice, frost fingers making long patterns like ferns on the surface; and boys idling along the quays threw stones at it, breaking the thin sheets with a sharp noise like window panes. The temperature fell, and the ice thickened, and then the day came when the flung stones skittered across the surface, and the first daring soul took a tentative step on to it and found it bore his weight. The next instant, it seemed, there were skaters in coats of sheepskin dyed scarlet and deep blue and green, whirling and darting like bizarre winter dragonflies; and high, narrow horse-drawn sleighs, laden with goods or with fur-swathed passengers, flying along the river as on a road, the drivers ringing their bells and cracking their whips for clear passage.

The snow came, falling feathery and soft, melted at first by the wheels of the carriages, and piled into ridges down the broad thoroughfares. And it grew colder, and the snow settled, and fell all night in a silent wilderness out of the black sky, and the next day the carriages were put away and the sledges and troikas were brought out, and travel in the city became like something in a dream: unbelievably swift and almost soundless over a glittering carpet of crushed diamond. It grew colder still, and the surface of the snow froze, and more snow fell on the roads and on the river and the canals, obliterating them, so that the city seemed to grow larger as the boundaries disappeared, and movement seemed freer – no difference now between the elements of earth and water, bound together in a single plane beneath the enveloping icy air.

The days grew shorter and the nights longer. Anne saw the other side of the coin from the white nights now, in those long nights beginning in mid-afternoon and lasting until mid-morning. Yet the nights didn’t seem so dark after all, filled as they were with movement and laughter and torchlight and the hissing of the snow under the runners of a thousand sleighs, their swinging coach-lamps spilling yellow light like honey into the shadows as they hurtled round corners on their way to some urgent pleasure.

All the families were back from their summer retreats, ready for the almost frantic sociability of the Petersburg winter Season. The circle in which the Kirovs moved included the families Anne already knew – the Fralovskys, Tiranovs, Tchaikovskys and Kovanins – together with dozens more she had never met. Uncle Petya Bazarov, Vera Borisovna’s brother, was an early caller – a huge man with a beard, dressed in Cossack tunic and trousers – who lived a strange and eremitical life in a house on the Vassilevsky Island. He drank hugely, though he never appeared to be drunk, and spoke Russian instead of French, but he was a great favourite with everyone, even the fashionable set, and Anne was once again impressed with the generosity of the Russian mind, which enjoyed people as they were, without applying restrictive social rules to them.

Every day now had its engagements. There were dinners and balls and routs and card-parties and supper-parties; there was the theatre and the ballet, Court receptions, military reviews and parades; there were troika races and skating-parties and masquerades. Anne’s wardrobe could not have stood the strain had not a great deal of her newly free time been devoted to buying materials and making up new gowns.

As for her outdoor clothes, as soon as the first frost came, Irina had given Anne a shooba: a heavy coat of felted wool, with a thick, quilted lining stuffed with kapok. When the snows began, the Count made her a present of a fur-lined cloak and a fur hat with long lappets, and the Countess gave her a fur muff. Anne was overwhelmed by the magnitude of the gifts, but her employers made nothing of it. It was obvious, they said, that she must have the right clothes for the Russian winter, and who should provide them but themselves? Anne bought herself a pair of sheepskin gauntlets and a pair of the white felt boots called valenki she had so admired in the shops. With the memory of English snow and slush, Anne had some doubts as to the wisdom of the colour; but she soon learned that the Russian snow was so cold that it remained powdery and quite dry, so the boots never got dirty or discoloured.

Wrapped in all these, and further protected by a huge bearskin rug, Anne would sit beside her master and mistress in the large, three-horse sleigh, its eight bells ringing in harmony like a strange kind of frozen music, and be sped along through the torch-lit streets to yet another party. Parties often began late and went on until the early hours of the morning, and Petersburg never seemed to go to sleep.

Anne met Basil Tchaikovsky at Princess Kovanina’s soirée, and despite her poor opinion of his intellect, could not help feeling a little flattered by the haste with which he came to bow over her hand.

‘Anna Petrovna! How delightful to see you again so soon!’

‘Basil Andreyevitch!’ she replied in kind. ‘What a surprise! I thought you lived in Moscow and found Petersburg insipid?’

‘Why, who told you so?’ he said indignantly.

‘You did yourself, at the ball at Grubetskaya.’

‘Oh, one cannot be bound by what one says at balls,’ he said airily, waving one of the white hands of which he was so proud. An emerald ring caught the light so attractively that he was pleased with the gesture, and repeated it. ‘The conversation at balls obeys different rules from conversation anywhere else.’

Anne smiled. ‘Yes, you’re right. That’s very witty,’ she said kindly.

‘My dear Anna Petrovna, must you sound so surprised about it? I am famous for my wit in three capitals.’

‘Yes, so I’ve heard, and from a good authority.’

‘Which is–? No, don’t answer. You will say I told you so myself.’ He surveyed her critically. ‘There is a new confidence about you, Anna Petrovna. It suits you. But where does it come from?’

‘Why sir, you must know better than anyone,’ she said, enjoying herself. ‘Did you not cross this room to claim me as an acquaintance? What could give a woman more confidence than the approval of Basil Andreyevitch Tchaikovsky? Did you not say that if you took me up, I should be made?’

‘Well, it’s true,’ he said, narrowing his eyes, ‘but I cannot help feeling that when you say it, you are funning me.’

Anne tried for a more sober look. ‘Are we not to have the pleasure of your sister’s company tonight?’

‘No, Olga is engaged at Court. I have been working for an appointment for her, as lady-in-waiting to the Empress. I have some influence with dear Maria Feodorovna, you know. She quite dotes on me, the sweet creature.’

‘Yes, I’ve noticed that you have a way with the older ladies, as well as with the young ones,’ Anne said. ‘I was observing you just now engaged in a tête-a-tête with Princess Shuvalova. She seemed enthralled by what you were saying.’

‘Oh, I was talking scandalously to her,’ Basil said lightly. ‘The older they are, you know, the bolder they like you to be. But I must tell you’, he went on, leaning closer, ‘how much good I have done you already. Princess Kovanina told me yesterday that she is to get an English governess for her own little Anastasia! By the end of the season, it will be the height of fashion, I promise you! There will be a whole community of English women in Petersburg, but with you at the head, of course. So now, dear Anna Petrovna, will you be kind to me?’

‘But I am kind to you, sir. You see how I smile and talk to you, thus confirming your own good taste in choosing to converse with one upon whom you yourself have bestowed the accolade of approval?’

She gave him her most innocent look as he attempted to unravel the sense of what she had said, and, failing completely, could only give a sickly smile and say, ‘Quite so. You are right, of course. Pray, mademoiselle, as there is to be no dancing tonight, may I prevail upon you to play for us on the pianoforte later?’

‘Provided I play only to accompany a song from you, sir,’ Anne replied, and he smirked and bowed his pleasure at the compliment.

However much it piqued her, Anne had to acknowledge that Basil’s attentions did make her sought after. Hostesses asked her to play and sing for them; young men asked her to dance; and young ladies chatted to her politely and begged her to sit beside them or take a turn about the room with them. However little she understood society’s propensity to think him intellectual and witty, she found that his good opinion secured everyone else’s – with the exception of his sister. She plainly disliked Anne, though even that conferred a sort of distinction. Olga, Anne decided, was courted more for her brother’s sake than her own.

It amused the Count that her rapidly acquired reputation for intelligence came from Basil’s recommendation, and he frequently teased her about it.

‘You should be grateful to him,’ he said once. ‘There are few young men in Petersburg with sufficient wit to recognise yours. If Basil Andreyevitch had not told them how clever you are, they would never notice it for themselves.’

‘You are too kind to him, sir,’ Anne retorted. ‘He has no opinion of your intelligence at all.’

The Count laughed. ‘I should be unhappy to think he was able to understand me! Make the most of the situation, Anna. Enjoy it – that’s my advice.’

Anne soon met the Kovanins’ new English governess, a Miiss Emma Hatton who originally came from Hampshire. She was some years older than Anne, and of a limited education, but Anne found it delightful to have an Englishwoman to talk to again, someone who had grown up under the same skies and the same social conventions, who spoke English without translation and remembered the same history. Miss Hatton’s duties were only to teach Princess Anastasia, who was eleven years old, to speak and read English, so she had even more free time than Anne. They met frequently and went shopping or for walks together. Miss Hatton had been several years in Petersburg and knew most of the great families at least by repute, and she proved a useful source of gossip and news.

Despite the below-zero temperatures, Anne still took the children out for their daily airing. Sometimes they would go for a walk – Nyanka thought this a peculiarly English insanity and would have nothing to do with it, so when they walked, it would be Tanya who came with them to hold Natasha’s other hand. A small one-horse sleigh had been put at Anne’s disposal, and sometimes she and the children would cram into it together, and go for a drive along the frozen river or over the glittering fields. The children also introduced her to the delights of tobogganing. An artificial slope was built in the garden of the Kirov Palace for their private delight, and Nyanka’s services were frequently called upon to weight the roller with which the level at the end of the slope was kept smooth and flat. Miss Hatton sometimes brought her Anastasia to join the party, and a cautious friendship grew up between her and Yelena. It would have flourished more freely had not Vera Borisovna encouraged it so blatantly. She approved of the Kovanins and pushed so hard for Yelena and Anastasia to become bosom-bows that a certain amount of hostility between them was inevitable.

Having Yelena taken off her hands for so much of the day, Anne interested herself more in Natasha, and began to teach her to write and draw. She displayed a considerable talent for sketching, especially people and animals, which, though childishly inaccurate, displayed a life and vigour all their own. Despite the fact that she still would not speak, she extended her mastery of the pencil to her pothooks and was soon able to write ‘Nasha’ and ‘Mama’ and ‘Anna’ underneath her portraits in large, wobbly letters. In a short time she had grown much attached to Anne and listened with keen attention as Anne told her the names of the stars or the Kings and Queens of England. She had her third birthday, and the Count bought her a toboggan of her own, painted in blue and white, with a swan’s head with a gilded beak. She loved it so much, she insisted on taking it to bed with her every night, and only a great deal of firmness on Nyanka’s part persuaded her to keep it beside rather than in her bed.

In February, the winter fun reached its peak in the carnival season, which would culminate in the masslenitsa – Shrovetide – festivities, a sort of last grasp at gaiety before Lent began. A great fair was held on the river, with all sorts of displays and stalls.

‘This is something you mustn’t miss, Anna,’ the Count said. ‘Shall we take her, Irushka? And the children, of course.’

The Dowager was visiting a friend at Court and would be away all day, and probably all night too, and Anne expected the Countess to leap at the opportunity of an outing with her husband and children without interference. But she only shook her head without lifting her eyes from her work. ‘Oh, no, forgive me, Nikolasha, but I don’t think I could bear the crowds and the pushing and the noise.’ She did not see the expression of disappointment which passed across his face. ‘But you should go, Anna. Perhaps you could make up a party with the young Tiranovs and the Tchaikovskys.’

The Count demurred. ‘Oh no, I don’t mean to go in a regular party, and particularly not a party in which I am regarded as an elderly nuisance!’ He fixed Anne with a sardonic eye. ‘To have Basil Tchaikovsky make me feel de trop would be too much for my frail self-confidence. Just a family outing was all I had in mind. Wait, I have it! Uncle Petya shall come with us. He’s the very person to make the most of the fair. You and I, Anna, and Uncle Petya and the children – what do you say?’

Uncle Petya’s size and bulk, Anne discovered, were certainly useful for thrusting a way through the crowds; and after a few minutes he swept Natasha up on to his shoulders, where she rode like a monkey clinging on to his huge fur collar and getting the best view. There was plenty to see. There were boxing-booths, musicians, sword-swallowers, fire-eaters, dancing bears and dogs, acrobats and jugglers. There was a troop of Cossacks who did tricks on horseback, jumping on and off at full gallop, standing on the saddle, and jumping from one horse to another. They also gave a display of Cossack dancing, full of curious leaps and leg-kicks; and there was a troupe of gypsy dancers, too, all in red and gold, the women’s dresses sewn all over with shining metal discs, who twirled and clapped to a sawing tune on the fiddle.

There were wandering peddlers selling ribbons and trinkets and sweetmeats, and stalls where you could buy anything the heart desired, from a pewter plate to a handful of treacle cakes – pryaniki. Anne now discovered what the peasants did during the long frozen winter when they could not work the land. The fruit of the dark days was on sale all around: wooden shoes and valenki, gloves, stockings, furniture, pots and pans, blankets, toys, icons, preserved fruit, bead necklaces, decorated trinket-boxes, saddlery, dog collars, whips, painted baskets and bird cages.

Anne was enjoying it all enormously, and was guiltily glad that the Countess had not come with them. Everything was so much more fun as they were: Uncle Petya forced a way through for them, and the Count and Anne, with Yelena between them, slipped in after him like gulls riding a wake. Once when they were in a particularly dense part of the crowd, the Count took hold of Anne’s hand to stop her getting separated from them, and forgot to release it for quite a time. There was no reserve or tension between them. She felt, as she had felt that time at the waterfall, that it was they who were the family, they and the children.

They wandered amongst the stalls and watched the displays, marvelled at the acrobats, laughed at the puppet-play, clapped in time to the stamping of the dancers, ate hot pasties and roasted apples and pryaniki, and drank hot tea sweetened with raspberry jam. Uncle Petya bought Natasha a wooden doll, and Lolya a coral necklace; and the Count bought Anne a cross of blue enamel from Kiev set in delicate gold filigree. Uncle Petya bought a flask of vodka from a drinking booth, and the Count tasted it and pronounced it vile stuff, and then, laughing, produced a small flask of his own from under his coat.

The short day darkened, and flares and torches were lit. On the frozen river, skaters danced to the music of a band playing in a wooden shelter with charcoal braziers all around to keep their instruments from freezing. Dominating the scene was the great artificial ice-hill, a stout wooden frame covered with packed snow, down which the fur-hatted citizens were tobogganing with wild shrieks of glee on to the three-feet-thick ice of the river. ‘Oh Papal’ Yelena cried, turning a passionate face up to him.

‘What, risk your beauty, my little rose petal?’ the Count smiled, cupping her pink cheek with one hand. ‘Suppose you overset? What would Grand’mère say if I brought you back all black and blue?’

‘Oh, I don’t care about that. And anyway, we won’t overset. Oh Papa, please let’s! Uncle Petya, please!’

The Count smiled at Anne. ‘What about you, Anna Petrovna? Are you pining to try it?’

‘It does look very exciting,’ Anne said, ‘but I don’t know if it’s quite proper. Do ladies toboggan in public?’

‘Now you have said the one thing that would persuade me,’ he grinned. ‘Proper? Is that my English Anna, two thousand miles from home, wondering about propriety?’

‘I have a reputation to preserve, sir,’ Anne laughed. ‘What would Basil Tchaikovsky say?’

‘After I danced with you at the Embassy Ball at the Tuileries, you had no reputation left to lose,’ he said firmly. ‘Come on then, let’s to it! We’ll scale the mountain! Uncle Petya, hold tight to Nasha. Lolya, give me your hand.’

There were toboggans to hire at the foot of the slope for those who had not brought their own. Anne, still wondering if it were quite the thing, and perfectly sure that Lady Murray would have had ten fits if she had been here to see it, took charge of a battered red one and climbed, not without apprehension, to the taking-off stage at the top of the hill. The Count showed her how to sit on the sled and how to hold the rope, set her straight, and pushed her off.

There was a moment of sinking terror as she lurched over the rim of the slope; and then a mixture of wild exhilaration and fear as she gathered speed and the little wooden frame rocked and rattled over the streaked and glassy surface of the hill. The icy air streamed past her cheeks and tears broke from her eye-corners, and she had a brief watery impression of the lights and colours and pink faces of the crowds below rushing up towards her; and then it was all over. She was jolting over level ground, and two huge men in peasant tunics and sheepskin gloves had halted her, and were helping her to her feet.

She staggered a little, feeling dazed and dizzy. Her lungs seemed to be full of ice-cold space; there were tears on her blood-burning cheeks; and she felt horribly disappointed that it was over.

The Count and Lolya appeared beside her, having come down together. He grinned at Anne, and she knew by the cold air on her teeth that she was grinning too, in a ridiculous, exhilarated fashion.

‘You were shrieking all the way down,’ he said.

‘Was I? I didn’t know.’

‘Again! Papa, again!’ Lolya cried urgently, tugging her father’s sleeve. Uncle Petya appeared with Natasha.

‘Just once more, then,’ the Count said. ‘Coming, Anna?’

‘Certainly,’ she said. ‘And I won’t scream this time.’

The same fear and excitement as before; and as she hurtled down, Anne could feel herself shrieking, though she could not hear it, and could not have stopped herself. ‘It’s better than galloping on a fast horse,’ she said afterwards.

‘Not better – different,’ the Count said.

‘Again, Papa! I want to go again!’ Lolya shrieked.

Anne shook her head involuntarily – the child seemed too excited – and the Count hesitated too, but Natasha was tugging at Uncle Petya’s sleeve, her face turned up urgently like a pink flower, and he said, ‘Oh, once more won’t hurt them, Nikolasha.’ He touched Natasha’s head. ‘You’d like to go just once more, wouldn’t you, Nashka maya?’

‘Very well, but this is the last,’ the Count said.

‘Enough for me,’ Anne said. ‘I’ll wait here.’ Her legs were trembling. She caught the Count’s eye, pleading caution. It was too exciting to be entirely safe.

She stood at the bottom of the slope, waiting for them to appear up above. It looked very far away, and it was hard to tell one black shape from another in the crowd at the top by the wavering light of the torches. Each sled as it came down made a thud and a hard swishing sound; a hurtling, rigid bundle of colour with a pink circle at the top of it. All around her there were people talking, laughing, shouting to one another; stall holders crying their wares; music from three different bands crashing together like waves hitting a rock; and suddenly all the sounds merged into something solid, a single seamless thing, like a wall of silence.

In that silence, she saw the Count and Uncle Petya with the children starting down. They were too small and bundled up for her to be able to recognise their features, but she knew it was them; and with another part of her attention she saw also the two young men, laughing and probably drunk, run on to the slope from the bottom, towing their toboggans, trying to climb upwards, slipping back helplessly and falling over on the glassy surface. It all happened so quickly, that she could not understand afterwards how there seemed to be time to notice everything: the thin, fair beard of one young man, and the slate-blue colour of the other’s greatcoat, and his gloved hand dark like a starfish against the ice as he fell sprawling, the bottle he had been holding slithering and spinning like a live thing down the slope away from him.

She saw people’s mouths opening and shutting in shouted warnings, but she could hear nothing in that wall of silence. Her own mouth was stretched open too – she felt a pain under her jaws. People were moving forward like a surging wave. The toboggans, one behind the other, sped like bullets, and the young men, still laughing, tried to scramble out of the way. The Count, with Yelena between his knees, missed them by inches. Uncle Petya’s sled did not. He and the young men, in a sprawl of arms and legs, went sliding down the rest of the slope together like an untidy mat. Natasha, jerked out of his grasp like a projectile, went flying in an arc over the side of the hill and fell with a heavy thud.

Anne had no memory of moving, but she must have been running already, for she reached Natasha before anyone had had time to touch her.

‘Nasha! Nasha!’ she cried as she flung herself down, reaching out hands for the little bundle of red coat and rabbit-furred hood. The cold of the packed snow struck through her knees, and the sounds were suddenly back, a blurred babble of cries and expostulations. Natasha opened her eyes and stared upwards unrecognisingly. ‘Nasha, are you all right?’ Anne said foolishly, touching, brushing away snow, trying to find out what damage had been done. She felt the Count arrive at her shoulder, saw Natasha’s eyes uncloud and recognise first her and then her father.

‘Yes,’ Natasha said. ‘All right. Want to go again.’

The Count made a sound between a sob and a laugh, and his hands came past Anne to seize his child and lifted her into his arms. ‘What?’ he said unsteadily. ‘What did you say? Nasha, Nashka, what did you say?’

‘Want to go again,’ she repeated, putting her arms round his neck as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The Count, holding her tightly, looked across her at Anne, his mouth laughing, while his eyes quite independently went on crying.

‘Did you hear that, Annushka?’ he said. ‘She wants to go again. Did you hear?’

Anne nodded, knowing that if she spoke she would sound as drunk and foolish as he. She patted Natasha’s back with a helpless gesture, and the Count encircled her with his free arm and drew her against him too, holding them both tightly against him until he could stop trembling.

Natasha didn’t say anything else, but she was plainly unhurt: she moved freely and smiled normally, and the minutest search on Anne’s part could find no injury beyond a slight bruise on one cheek. Her infant limpness and the bundling of her clothes must have protected her and cushioned the fall. Once they were in the troika going home, she fell asleep on her father’s lap. Anne wondered anxiously if she might be concussed, but it seemed a perfectly natural sleep, and even Lolya was heavy-eyed after all the exertion and excitement.

‘I shan’t feel easy until she has been seen by a physician,’ Uncle Petya said. ‘Oh God, if only I hadn’t taken her down the third time! I’ll never forgive myself if she’s been hurt!’

‘Don’t,’ the Count said shortly. He looked bone weary, and Anne, beside him, longed to touch him, to comfort him in some way. ‘It wasn’t your fault. She’ll be perfectly all right after a good night’s sleep.’

‘Yesilev’s a good physician,’ Uncle Petya went on, twisting the end of his beard between his fingers. ‘He took care of the young Fralovskys when they had the measles. Shall I send for him?’

‘Tomorrow,’ the Count said. ‘Tomorrow will be soon enough. Look, you see there’s nothing wrong with her. She’s sleeping naturally.’

‘Oh God, pray it’s so,’ Petya said, uncomforted.

Vasky opened the door to them, and the Count, carrying Natasha, headed straight for the stairs. ‘Where’s her ladyship?’ he asked.

‘Her ladyship retired early to bed, sir. She felt rather tired. Has something happened, sir?’

‘A slight mishap, nothing serious,’ the Count said, already half-way up the first flight. Anne, hurrying behind him with Yelena, heard Uncle Petya begin a voluble explanation.

In the nursery, Nyanka, tutting but blessedly calm, took over her charge and undressed her and put her to bed without waking her, and then took Lolya off, promising her a hot bath, a bowl of bread and milk, and a story too, if she was good. Left alone, the Count and Anne stood for a while watching the sleeping child. Her fair eyelashes lay in a thick fan on her pink cheek, and her curled fingers rested beside her lightly-parted lips. She looked healthy and peaceful.

‘I think she’ll be all right,’ the Count said, and then looked up at Anne. ‘It did happen, didn’t it? I didn’t dream it? Nasha did speak?’

‘Yes,’ Anne said with a faint smile. ‘Her first words.’

‘Not particularly special ones, considering how long we’ve waited for them,’ he said, ‘but thank God for them, all the same. No matter how often one reassures oneself–’

‘Yes, I know,’ Anne said. ‘But she’s perfectly normal. A perfectly normal little girl.’

He looked down at the sleeping child. ‘Little Nemetzka,’ he said with a rough tenderness. ‘Her first words, Anna!’ He looked up. ‘I’m glad you were there to hear them.’

She met his eyes, shining with tiredness and emotion, and felt too much, and tried to cover it up. ‘Before long, she’ll be chattering so much, you’ll long for her to be silent again,’ she said with an attempt at lightness.

The Count took her hand and lifted the fingers to his lips for an instant before turning away. ‘And now,’ he said, ‘I had better go and see if my wife is still awake and break the news to her before some servant scares her out of her wits with tales of horror. Will you go and keep poor Petya company, Anna? I’ll be down soon. Try to stop him beating his breast, will you?’

The next morning Anne hurried to the nursery as soon as she was dressed. Natasha was being dressed by Nyanka, and she ran to Anne as soon as she saw her and gave her a silent hug around the knees, turning her eyes up to her with her usual golden smile.

‘She’s all right,’ Nyanka said gruffly. ‘No bones broken. What’s this Lolya is telling me, that my baby spoke last night?’

‘Yes, it’s true,’ Anne said. ‘Isn’t it, Nasha?’ She ruffled the tumble of mouse-fair curls, and Natasha nudged against her hand like a cat before running back to Nyanka to offer a foot for a stocking.

‘Well, if you say so, Barishnya, it must be so,’ Nyanka said grudgingly, ‘but she hasn’t spoken to me.’

She didn’t speak to the physician who came later that morning, either, or to anyone else. The words of the night before, jarred out of her, perhaps, by the shock of the accident, remained her sole venture into the world of speech, and once again Nyanka was driven to fall back on her old comfort of ‘she’ll speak when she’s ready’.

The physician pronounced Natasha unharmed, but recommended that she be kept quiet for a day or two, with no undue exertion or excitement. ‘There may be some nervous reaction,’ he said. ‘Watch her carefully. I’ll send round a tonic I recommend in these cases, and I’ll call again tomorrow.’

Later, Anne went down to the morning room, and found the Count and Countess alone there, standing by the window and looking out into the street. They had the appearance of having been interrupted in a private conversation, and Anne hesitated at the threshold.

The Countess turned and held out a welcoming hand to Anne. ‘Yes, come in! I have something to tell you. Is the doctor still upstairs?’

‘No, madame, he left a few minutes ago. Did you want to see him?’ Anne said.

‘It doesn’t matter. I can send word after him,’ the Countess said. ‘I wish to consult him, although it is only to confirm what I already know.’ She smiled, and her face seemed alight and alive in a way Anne had not seen before. ‘Dear Anna, have you not guessed? You are to have a new pupil! There is to be a new addition to the nursery! I am with child again!’

Anne’s mind worked with feverish rapidity, assembling all the tiny pieces of evidence which she had failed to put together over the past week or so. She was desperately aware of the Count’s presence and kept her eyes forcibly from him, lest she betray herself. She remembered in a painful jumble of images the evening they had just shared, and the moments of intimacy which had seemed, then, so important to her.

Intimacy! She felt a withering sensation inside her, as she tried not to think of exactly what this news meant. It was a knowledge she had refused all along, shutting it away in some inaccessible part of her mind, even – inexcusable folly! – allowing herself to believe it was not so. Now the truth was being forced upon her. This woman was his wife. She was with child. He had shared a bed with her.

Anne heard her voice saying the right things, congratulating them both with amazing calmness, even with the appearance of pleasure. And now her treacherous eyes, despite all her efforts, escaped her control. The Count stood beside his wife, not quite touching her, and met Anne’s regard like a stranger. His face was a meaningless blank, his eyes opaque to her. For the first time since she had met him that day on the Île de la Cité almost a year ago, she looked at him and had no idea what he was thinking or feeling.