“Yes. That’s better. That’s true sharing.”
“Okay, but rule three doesn’t always work, either. As Solomon said in the Old Book, if two women squabble over which of them is the mother of a certain infant, the way to solve the problem is to cut the baby in half and share the baby in parts.”
“That’s revolting.”
“Is it? I always wondered if that baby was a colicky brat and both women were really trying to pawn it off on the other one. But what do I know from babies? I never had one. Anyway. Sharing in pieces doesn’t always work, either, if the treasure is ruined. So on to rule four: The stronger party gets the whole treasure.”
“That’s not sharing. It’s unfair.”
“The one with the gun always invents a reason why he deserves to have both the gun and the treasure. But, good, you’re listening. It isn’t really sharing, no. And so we get to the real rule four.”
“Which is?”
“Rule four: If there are no rules that work, no one gets the treasure. In other words, sharing the suffering.” At this the witch pulled from her sleeve a gorgeous chocolate gâteau with cream filling and glazed berries on top, and she tossed it out the open window.
“Why did you do that?”
“It was an illusion. It wasn’t really a cake. I was trying to make a point.”
The sight of the fake pastry enraged Cat. “This is silly. If there’s nothing to share, there’s no point in continuing the conversation on how to share it.”
“Exactly,” said the witch. “That’s where we began. What’s easiest to share is precisely nothing. We all get an equal part of nothing, if nothing is to be had.” She brisked her hands together, clapping imaginary chalk dust off them. “I like being a governess.”
“What about that useless egg?” Mewster twitched his whiskers toward the Fabergé egg still suspended in the air. “What a fancy omelet that would make.”
“It’s not edible. It’s porcelain, with gold leaf and jewels,” said Cat.
“That’s all right, I have iron teeth,” said the witch, plucking the egg out of the floating nest.
“You can’t eat that.” Cat was beside herself. “It’s not a snack.”
“You gave it to me,” said Baba Yaga. “I can do what I want with it. If I cut this egg up into three perfectly equal pieces, which slice would you like? Destruction, Creation, or Life as she is lived these days? By which I mean the ice-dragon, the Firebird, or the beautiful young witch in her stylish country getaway?”
“Please don’t. It’s Solomon and the baby again,” said Cat. “You’d ruin it, taking away its value. I’d rather you have the whole treasure than smash it for the sake of a schoolroom lesson in goodness.”
“Oh, it’s too late for that,” said Baba Yaga. The tone of her voice had changed. “It’s ruined already.”
“What do you mean?”
The egg was so close to the witch’s face that it looked like a jeweled carbuncle sprouting from her nose. She peered with one eye, then the other, and rotated the ornament to examine the scene in each of its three apertures.
Finally she handed the egg to Cat. “Tell me what you see, so I can be sure I’m not going all loosey-goosey in the noggin.”
Cat examined the glorious impracticality. “Well, in the first window, here is a huge dragon lounging on a snowy steppe. Is that what you mean?”
“Keep looking.”
“The second window shows you in your little house. You don’t look much like yourself. You look much —”
“Better in real life. I know. It’s called charisma. What about the third window?”
The girl turned the egg one more time. The third window showed a spring forest of white birches. For a moment Cat was confused; what was wrong with this? Boring, but pretty enough.
Then she realized. “Oh, my. The Firebird. It’s missing.”
“No wonder I can’t even rustle up a skillet full of sticky buns,” said Baba Yaga. “I knew the world was ill; my little Russian winter melted without my permission. I thought the Tsar or his advisors might know why. But where has the Firebird gone? He was there when you first gave me the present. Now he’s flown away.”
“What does it mean?” asked Cat.
It was hard to imagine that white-as-egg-yolk face growing whiter, but Cat could swear that it had. The witch wobbled and began to poke about for a chair. Her little wicker rocker slid forward just in time. She spoke tentatively, working it out. “The soul of Russia is sickly. Even a fancy-schmancy bibelot made by some suck-up in London knows the truth. Perhaps the Firebird, wherever he is, is dying? He needs to lay his egg, as the classical phoenix taught him to do, and resurrect himself? If he won’t complete the cycle and emerge, then maybe Russia is dying, too?”
“Why should you care about that? Baba Yaga only cares about herself. She eats the whole fish, remember?”
The hummingbird ventured out of the cuckoo clock and did an un-hummingbird thing. It perched on the edge of a wineglass, perfectly still. Mewster did a thing that cats rarely do: paid no attention to an available bird. They both looked skeptically at the witch.
Finally Baba Yaga turned to Cat. I’d like to say she was stricken lovely with wisdom. She wasn’t. She looked as if she’d swallowed an assortment of her own hangnails. “All this talk about sharing. We will share starvation if we learn to share nothing else. If Russia is dying, then magic is dying, too. And I do care. I have to. Don’t you understand? I am Mother Russia.”
She stood up. She looked no different. Still like a misshapen marionette figure, newly liberated from its strings, uncertain of its strength. Her wicked old face was full of a complex curiosity.
Cat was old enough to know that worry is one of the functions of love, and the witch looked worried. What Cat didn’t realize was that she was worried for the witch.
That’s all they had to share tonight. A big stew of worry.
The approach to the station in Saint Petersburg was most exasperating. The train moved so slowly. But the delay gave Elena the chance to study what of the great capital she could see from the window of the parlor.
She gaped at the heaps of architecture. So much plaster and marble, all in untroubled colors. She watched the lucky citizens in the streets. It was nothing to walk about Saint Petersburg, so what might people on a train be looking at? That’s what they said, their shoulders like that, their spines so erect.
The streets were skinned with water. Passersby raised their skirts or trouser legs, sometimes picking their way along board walkways. Not much use when horses and carriages kicked up a dirty fountain. The wealthier people, Elena guessed, stayed dry by being driven about in droshkies or troikas.
As if thinking the same thing, Madame Sophia said, “If he has managed to keep in touch with the stationmaster, Korsikov will meet us with the carriage. Are you excited, Ekaterina?”
Elena was so excited that for a moment she forgot that the great-aunt was addressing her. “Oh, yes, I am, ma tante,” she finally said.
“It seems so long since you’ve been here. I expect you’ll find it quite —” She lifted her eyebrows at the prospect. “Quite wet.”
Miss Bristol appeared in the doorway. She was flushed. “I’m told we are cleared for a platform,” she said. She drilled a look of instruction at Elena. Get ready to flee, said the look.
The train put out a final burst of steam and slid into a great shed. It came to a halt beneath a glass canopy resting on iron columns. Elena checked the fastenings on her high-buttoned shoes, the ones with the red leather linings. She didn’t want to risk falling over her own feet and being apprehended by railway security officers.
Miss Bristol and Monsieur d’Amboise had worked out a strategy with Elena. Miss Bristol and Elena would dismount and walk with the matron to the carriage halt, where it was presumed that Korsikov somehow would still be waiting with the trap, even though the journey had been delayed by a week or so. Just before boarding the carriage, Elena would run away. She would have to f
ind her way to the Tsar on her own. She would ask for directions.
She had her mother’s doll in her purse. She would forego the rubies. Pity.
Her departure would distress Madame Sophia. But there seemed no other way. Sooner or later the great-aunt had to discover that the Fabergé egg had gone missing. Elena and the staff would be accused of conspiracy and theft.
So when Elena made her break, Miss Bristol would lunge after her, calling, “Miss Ekaterina!” and she, too, would round the corner, out of sight. There, Miss Bristol would regain her breath and consider herself dismissed from service.
Monsieur d’Amboise, meanwhile, would escort the luggage to Madame Sophia’s home by hired cart. After seeing the steamer trunks delivered into the butler’s hall, Monsieur d’Amboise would liberate himself. He’d rejoin the governess in the lee of the famous basilica, the Church of Our Savior on the Spilled Blood. With luck, they’d make it across the Grand Duchy of Finland to the border of Sweden before Madame Sophia discovered that the Fabergé egg was missing, too, and raise the alarm.
“Ah, Vitebsky Station.” Madame Sophia clapped her hands as they prepared to dismount. “At last. ‘Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there’s no place like home.’ Now, where is the box with the bespoke present for His Imperial Majesty?”
“It is in your hat trunk, where you placed it ten minutes ago, Madame,” said Miss Bristol. “And your hat trunk is in your left hand.”
“Then you hold my right hand, Ekaterina, and help me alight,” said the great-aunt. This involved negotiating a rolling wooden staircase steadied by a porter. Should she take a tumble, there was quite a lot of her to descend.
The old pomaded battle-ax hadn’t been out of her rooms in the private carriage for nearly a month. “Ouf,” she said, and “Zut alors!” and “Mon Dieu!” and “That extra croissant I had on Shrove Tuesday last, it seems to have settled,” and also “When I was a circus acrobat, this was a good deal easier,” but Elena could tell by now that she was joking. She wasn’t such a bad sort, tante Sophia.
Finally they were squarely on the rail platform. All around them people were rushing to leave or disembarking from other trains. Shouts of welcome and shrieks of anguished farewell, and flap-flappity-flap of the wings of pigeons circulating under the roof, studying the pavement for crumbs.
“Madame,” called a man’s voice. Here came Korsikov, it seemed, a bandy-legged little man with a hump on his back and a frown creasing his brow. “Eleven days behind schedule. I had feared the worst. I’d seen you sinking beneath these tides. Or attacked by Tartars or disenchanted muzhiks, or marauding bands of elk deranged by starvation. Or you’d become indisposed and been buried in some unmarked grave of Muscovy. I’d all but given up hope.”
“Ever the optimist. Delighted to see you, too, Korsikov. And sorry to have kept you waiting. Look, here is Miss Ekaterina! She’s grown so since her last visit! Do you recognize her?”
The driver looked at Elena, who kept her eyes trained on his muddy boots. “My,” he said in a voice that had darkened considerably, “you have changed a great deal, Miss Ekaterina. Haven’t you.”
“Hello.” Elena let her eyes slide toward Miss Bristol’s boots.
“She’s been under the weather; the trip did not agree with her,” snapped Miss Bristol. “She hasn’t been herself, and we should get her home, Korsikov. Don’t look so gloomy. We survived.”
“Call up the army, it is the return of Mees Bresstollll,” he replied. “Right this way. You can wait in the front of the station while I collect the carriage.”
He led them through the great hall to a plaza beyond. Much commerce and traffic, people coming and going and having unimaginable lives.
Madame Sophia gripped Elena’s hand tightly. “It is so easy to get lost here, and Saint Petersburg is not Kensington. Were we separated, I’m not sure you could find your way home, so I mean to keep you safe. Excited, my dear?”
“Very,” said Elena. And she was. Her insteps flexed in her tight boots, readying.
“Good. So am I. The thought of my own pillow fills my head with sleep. Miss Bristol, have you got the hat trunk?”
“You have it, Madame. In your left hand.”
“Oh, yes. Look, here’s Korsikov already. Yoo-hoo! He’ll be pulling up next. I must ask him what he has heard about the Tsar’s festival. He will know everything. I do hope it hasn’t been canceled, but then if it has, there are rubies sooner than your eighteenth birthday for you, so I suppose you will be happy either way.”
The great-aunt let go of Elena’s hand so she could reach up and haul herself into the carriage. Miss Bristol shoved from behind as elegantly as she could. She turned as Madame Sophia’s bottom was negotiating the doorway of the carriage and indicated with her eyebrows and a swift jerk of her head, Now! Now!
But the great-aunt had entrusted the hatbox with the big old egg in it to Elena. If she ran now, she’d be running away with it. It made no sense for her to run off with Madame Sophia’s hatbox. Even though Elena had begun to doubt her memories about the Firebird, the great-aunt thought the Fabergé egg was still inside the box. The hue and cry of the chase, the accusation of robbery. Guilt by implication.
Not to mention the rubies, which also caused her to pause.
Miss Bristol broke the paralysis by grabbing the hatbox from Elena and making even more menacing expressions at the girl.
“That hat trunk, Miss Bristol, where is it; have we loaded it yet?” called Madame Sophia from the carriage.
“It is here, Madame!” Miss Bristol replied with unusual emphasis. She all but shoved the hatbox into the carriage, and she mouthed at Elena, Are you mad? Think of your mother! This is your chance! Flee!
Her mother. Of course. And Elena curtseyed, to thank Miss Bristol for reminding her what she needed to do, and why. As she turned on her heel, her upper arm was clamped as if by iron. “Let me help you up, Miss Ekaterina,” said Korsikov.
“I … I … I believe I left something …” she began to stammer.
“What’s lost is always found,” he replied through gritted teeth, and more or less forced her into the carriage. “I shall see to that. Miss Bristol, you next.” And he impounded the governess in the carriage as effortlessly as, weeks earlier, the Tsar’s soldiers had abducted Elena’s brother Luka.
The ride through Saint Petersburg, a certain torment for Elena.
On the one hand, she’d missed her opportunity to escape. This may have condemned the governess and the butler to persecution. Miss Bristol clearly thought so; sitting opposite Elena, she was busy shooting daggers of hatred from her beady black eyes.
On the other hand, Elena was that much closer to a treasure of rubies should the Tsar have canceled the festivities. With rubies, perhaps, somehow she might locate Luka and ransom him from military service. He could go back to Miersk. They could try to nurse their mother back to health, hold on till things improved and the báryn’s household returned with Alexei. Then they could be reunited. Live ever after, happily enough, not too happy — they were, after all, Russian.
“Look at that! Will you look at that!” said Madame Sophia. Elena peered out the window. She saw hundreds of young men, their shirts off in the winter air. Working up some sweat. Wielding shovels and sledgehammers in the earth. Over on this side of the road, over that direction, too. As if mining for salt. “Whatever could they be up to, making such a macédoine of our elegant city?”
“No doubt they’re being punished for theft,” snapped Miss Bristol. “The hungry in Russia are numberless as the stars. Theft is rampant. Punishment is merciless.” She almost sobbed.
Madame Sophia seemed not to notice. “I suspect these criminals are a prison detail assigned to dig new canals to help drain off the floodwater. I shall ask Korsikov when we arrive. Now, that parcel, Miss Bristol. Where have we put my hatbox?”
“No earthly idea,” said the governess. “For all I know we left it on the kerbstones.”
El
ena took pity. She picked up the wooden trunk and handed it to the old lady. When Madame Sophia wasn’t looking, Miss Bristol stuck her tongue out at Elena.
One morning, while Baba Yaga was exploring a sudden-onset conservatory that had appeared like a huge glass bustle on the rear end of Dumb Doma, Cat asked Mewster how he happened to come to be Baba Yaga’s familiar.
“Mind your own business,” he replied. “You think you’re the only one who made a mistake and has to pay the penalty?”
“Let me guess,” she said. “You’re really a prince cursed into service to the witch for seven years, and if someone kisses you, you’ll revert to your handsome form. Don’t hiss. Trust me, I have no interest in princes. You can stay trapped.”
“Whoever tries to kiss me, sweetheart, gets my claws hooked in her upper lip. Listen, we’re all trapped in our own lives. You, me, everyone we’ve ever met.”
Baba Yaga, who found potted palms bourgeois and so was tossing them out the window, disagreed. “I’m not trapped in my life. You’re trapped in my life. And Cat is trapped in the life of that cursed peasant girl she keeps mentioning.”
“Am I?” said Cat. “Were you expecting Elena to come along and be supper?”
“Elena Schmelena. Some peasant child or other. That’s why I put on the porch lights. And look what the cat drug in! A selfish prig who gave me a present so I can’t eat her. Give me a hand with this aspidistra; it’s a bruiser.”
“I’m not a selfish prig.”
“You are selfish. Have you given a single thought to what has happened to your alternate number stuck on that cursed train?”
Cat didn’t answer. The aspidistra sailed out with a brave flailing of fronds.
Now, perhaps you will think Cat cruel. All this time, hilarity and high jinks on chicken legs, and the girl hadn’t spent a moment wondering about the problems that must have beset her new friend. The witch was right. If by stepping sideways, Cat thought, I’ve escaped being trapped in my own life somehow, so has Elena. Like it or not.
Mewster settled down for a snooze, high up on the wardrobe where he couldn’t be subjected to an attack kiss. Cat rocked in the witch’s chair and, for a moment, thought about her mirror twin.