As far as Cat knew, Elena was marooned in an accident as surely as she herself was. It hadn’t been Elena’s fault that the train had started with such a jolt that the Fabergé egg had escaped, more or less bringing Cat with it. What kind of friend was Cat, after all, not to have thought of the distress visited upon Elena?
Not much of a friend, she concluded. I agree with her. Shame, shame. Then again, Cat was the unwilling houseguest to the greatest figure in Russian folk history, and she was distracted by magic.
Now Cat wondered. Had Elena been trapped on the train, hauled away? Been frightened out of her mind? Suffered her own desolation? Or had she jumped off Great-Aunt Sophia’s train a few versts on? Perhaps on the far side of the tracks, and that’s how Cat had missed crossing her path?
There were people to worry about in every direction, Cat was learning. Prior to the delay at Miersk, she’d had only one concern: how she would duck the attention of the godson of the Tsar without bringing dishonor upon her great-aunt. To whom the presentation at court seemed to matter a great deal.
Crash, bash. The witch had discovered a trove of asparagus ferns huddled under the harpsichord, and they were sailing out the window now. Someday would she tire of Cat and toss her out, too?
Though starting late, Cat now practiced worrying. What about Madame Sophia? Had she suffered at the disappearance of her beloved great-niece? Perhaps had a cardiac seizure? Maybe, when Cat’s absence had been discovered, the old lady had ordered the train to return to Miersk. If so, would the villagers admit to having seen Cat? To having ganged up on her and scared her away?
That’s what the patchy villagers had done, terrified her right into the arms of Baba Yaga. Though the villagers weren’t to blame for Baba Yaga. No one was to blame for Baba Yaga except, apparently, Baba Yaga.
Warmed up, Cat now moved on to fretting about Elena’s mother, too. Having seen little of her own parents except for brief and brittle visits, Cat had found Elena’s mother tender, if uncommonly limp. Were that kindly old doctor and the busybody grandmother still tending her, or was Natasha Rudina beyond help now?
We’re all imprisoned in our own parallel lives, thought Cat. Yet Elena and I, without quite getting to be true friends, have accidentally shared our lives. Now I can’t even help caring about her mother. It’s a kind of curse, friendship.
One of the differences between Miersk and Saint Petersburg was posture. The izbas and the chapel and barns of Miersk, all hewn logs and twig-work and tilting roofs, appeared drifted into place. The effect was of a pleasantly organic mess as built by myopic Canadian beavers.
Here, in Saint Petersburg, the buildings had been drawn with rulers and built to an arithmetic precision not guessed at by peasants or beavers.
Look: a statue centered in a perfect dial of a plaza. So lifelike that Elena thought it really was an officer about to plunge his steed off the marble plinth into the city traffic. But only a bronze hero, and pigeons were paying little attention to his nobility.
Damp boulevards and damp parks. Avenues slicing between high facades of imperial stucco, all facing one another without blinking. Elena was disoriented at once. When she fled Saint Petersburg via the rail lines, she’d have to ask for directions.
Finally the equipage turned into a narrower street and stopped at a house the color of new mint leaves. Madame Sophia said, “I will lean on each of you, my human canes.” At the top of granite steps, breathing heavily, she let go of Miss Bristol’s arm but kept Elena’s tightly clenched. She put a hand on her side, breathing through the pain. “Worth the effort, though. Now, Miss Bristol, the gift for the Tsar?”
“In your hatbox.”
“I knew that. I was just checking in on your memory. I sometimes worry it is failing you.” She winked at Elena while Miss Bristol pulled a cord and rang a bell.
Was this the palace of the Tsar, with all its carved marble and sparkling windows? When the great-aunt entered, however, she slung her gloves on a table. In aprons and caps, a couple of bowing maids and a swaybacked cook greeted Madame Sophia with warmth but formality. “You remember where your room is,” said the great-aunt, waving Elena up the interior staircase.
A few cubicles in a train carriage were one thing. But this! … A collection of rooms more ornate than she had ever imagined. Beyond pairs of doors, all flung open for welcome, she saw herds of furniture everywhere. Chairs and sofas upholstered in feverish silks. Tables and mantels carved unto the final inch with restless scrollwork. And everything tricked out in gold. Gold cloth, golden flocked wallpaper, gilding on every architectural punctuation point.
Tall pier glasses doubling the golden light.
Wherever Elena glanced, she saw herself in this space. She saw Elena in the garb of Miss Ekaterina. She saw her shoulders pulled back, as Monsieur d’Amboise had hectored her to learn. She saw her hair clean, brushed, upswept.
She saw someone for whom self-contempt was not the foundation garment worn every living day and slept in every night. This child in the mirror — a mystery, but a welcome one.
Did she think of the girl whose life she was stealing, of what misery Cat might be going through just at this moment?
I regret to say she did not.
At this moment, on the landing of the second flight of steps — the brightest part, for skylights let in aqueous light — she saw herself in yet another mirror. Clearly again, for the first time in a long time.
Was she Miss Ekaterina? Or was she a peasant girl stumbled into an accidental warren of comfort and magnificence? There was no witch here, unless Madame Sophia was a witch in disguise. There was no magician, no spell, no enchantment.
Was there?
Had she ever really seen a Firebird? Surely not. But if she had, if she’d grasped his tail feather, is this what she had wished for? Suddenly she felt uncertain. Really, how else could she have made her way to the top of this set of circumstances, standing in such pure elegant light, without the help of magic?
She’d dismissed that dawn vision as a dream. But if real magic — somehow — then how far would it take her?
She was still planning to run away. She thought she was. But what if she didn’t? What if she let Madame Sophia take her to the ball to meet the Tsar’s godson?
What if he fell in love with her? What if hers had become that sort of life?
So much impossible had happened up until this moment. Perhaps it was leading somewhere. Perhaps she wasn’t at the crest of her adventure, about to career back down the slope, back into that other life of want and woe. Perhaps she was merely midway, and the possibilities would continue to expand.
Approaching from below, Miss Bristol: “Govern yourself. You look like the cat that ate the canary.”
Elena turned. “I don’t know what you mean.”
“It means you look like a hungry peasant girl who has stuffed herself full of stolen marzipan and gingerbread. Exceedingly pleased with yourself.”
“Is that so?” For once Elena didn’t feel cowering. “Which is my room?”
Miss Bristol rushed up the final steps and swooped upon her at once. Her eyes looked wild. Her bony hands grasped Elena’s wrists. “You have no room here, missy. You have no rights here. You were to run away, and I to follow, and you lost your nerve. I am here to find it for you. Have you become bewitched by all this glamour? Prison will not have such pretty appointments, I promise you that.”
“Get off me, you’re hurting.”
“I see the greed in your eyes. No good can come of trying to trick life. Cook and the servants may not recognize that you are not the young Miss Ekaterina, whom they haven’t seen in five years. But Korsikov does, and so will Miss Ekaterina’s flighty parents, should they ever visit their supposed daughter, engaged to the Tsar’s godson and living a purloined life. You’ve decided to play with fire, child, and you will be burned. And you mean to hurt me as you play. But I will not have it.”
“You can leave,” said Elena. “Go down to the doorway where Monsieur d’Amboi
se will deliver the luggage. Run away with him right now. No one will put it together with me. They might think you have had romance, if they have enough imagination. If there is that much imagination in the world.”
Miss Bristol looked as if she’d been lanced. “You are a wicked child.”
“I am not. I’m tired and I want to rest. Where is my room?”
Miss Bristol sat down on the top step and put her face in her hands. She began to weep. She said some things that were unintelligible. Elena left her there and opened doors until she found a pretty room in the front of the house. It must be her room. A girl’s nightgown was laid out upon a chair covered in olive velvet, and fresh white roses nodded from a silver vase on a table in the middle of the carpet.
How very nice, she thought. How appropriately welcoming.
There was a book on the table. She opened it up to see if, enchanted with possibility, she had learned to read. But this proved not yet to have happened.
Why has this train slowed down so? Dumb Doma could walk faster in high heels,” complained the witch. “Even the table could walk faster.”
The table, which rarely got a compliment, began to do a traditional peasant dance that involved bending at the knees, leaping up, and kicking out, all in unison. Mewster, who’d been napping on the tablecloth, was flung toward the ceiling, where he caught hold of a rafter. Baba Yaga doubled up in laughter, while Cat tried to coax the creature down. Mewster hissed, “I’m warning you: I’m no house cat.”
“We’re on the same side,” said Cat, pouting, but turned back to Baba Yaga.
The witch threw open a window and leaned out. Her black-clad derrière stuck up like a cushion in a mortuary parlor. “Wheels, put on some muscle, or I’ll roll you all to kingdom come!” The wheels didn’t obey.
“I wouldn’t draw too much attention to yourself by screaming out the window,” said the kitten, who had inched down and was now planning revenge on the table. “You’ve slipped by unnoticed for quite a while, but don’t push your luck.”
“Luck is for peasants. Baba Yaga doesn’t have luck. Baba Yaga has fortune. Destiny. Still, it might be my destiny to be burned at the stake, even at this late stage of my career, so I take your point.” The witch swiveled her head, sniffing with her shark fin of a nose. “Lot of water in this world, Mewster.”
“Join a swim team.” The kitten was stalking the table, which was inching away.
“What are you saying?” asked Cat, who had crossed the English Channel on the boat train from Dover to Calais and had seen big water before. “Move over — let me see.”
It was late in the day. The spires from villages across the reaches looked like the tops of bottles of cologne. Cat guessed they were entering the outskirts of Saint Petersburg at last. The world, though, wasn’t drifted with snow but leveled with the sheen of glass.
“What in heaven is going on here?” asked Cat.
“Heaven has little to do with it, I’d warrant,” said the witch. “This is the work of confusion. I don’t have too much congress with God, myself; we stay out of each other’s hair.”
“Silent partners,” suggested the kitten, pouncing, claws out. The table jumped up on the sideboard.
“As the old proverb goes,” continued the witch, “if anything ever happens to God, we always have Saint Nicholas. Though how Saint Nicholas would deal with a winter more damp than icy is beyond my ken.”
“Has this thaw anything to do with your sense of the death of magic, do you think?” Cat asked of the witch.
“I have no sense, so I can’t say. What is that sound of rabble?”
The cargo train was pulling to a stop in a small town. It was the first time they’d entered a station during the daylight. “I hope your house isn’t discovered,” said Cat. “What would they do to you?”
“I told you. Dumb Doma is invisible to adults,” said the witch. “That’s why we’ve had no trouble from the crew of the train. But, bad cess upon us, it is visible to children. With any luck, the local children are languishing in a schoolroom or some other prison.”
“With any luck? I thought you don’t have luck,” the kitten taunted Baba Yaga. “Only destiny.” Such proved to be true, for by the time the train came to a halt, first three, then seven, then ten, then eighteen children began to surge toward the windows of Dumb Doma with their caps in their hands.
“One polushka! One denga! One kopek! Any coin of any size!” cried the children.
“Oh, the peskiness of brute childhood! I always detested it!” remarked the witch.
“Nonsense,” replied the kitten. “You ate children for a living and loved it.”
“Yes, but by invitation only. A mob is an ugly thing, and the younger, the uglier.”
“What do they want?” asked Cat.
“Kopeks!” yelled the children. “Money for food! And food! We want food!”
“Who doesn’t?” the witch hollered at them. “We don’t have a morsel. Go away.”
But the children didn’t. They could see Dumb Doma, and they loved the look of it. As Cat craned farther, she could tell that the house was sitting with its two big chicken legs stuck out, like the stiff legs of a porcelain doll coming straight off a bench. The children were reaching up to grab on to the legs and swing on them. The house was ticklish, and shivered its timbers.
“You better do something,” said Mewster, “or your house is going to collapse on its back, and then you’ll have to find rooms in this village and live here.”
“This is outrageous. I have never been under such an assault, even when Bajazet and Roxane came for dinner and trashed the place. If worse comes to worst, I’ll move to the Bronx and spend afternoons playing bingo in some church hall, cheating like the other old hens. Stop that at once!” she screamed again. “Urchins have no manners.”
The house was rocking back and forth in mirth. The table fell off the sideboard.
“Dumb Doma, if you don’t settle down, I’ll give those hoydens some giant barbecued chicken legs for supper!” bellowed Baba Yaga.
“Give them something,” said Cat. “Anything. Attention, even.”
“Oh, is that all it takes?” The witch used a soupy voice. “So glad I have a high-level security advisor on board.” Still, she changed her tone when she returned to the window. “Children, your old babushka doesn’t have two coins to call her own.”
“Give us gold ingots, then!” shouted some wag, and the other children laughed.
“I’ll give you what for,” muttered the witch, then: “Old Granny Greasy-Hair doesn’t have a smidgen for you, much less a side of beef.”
“Milk and bread!” they chorused.
“Not a chance. Would you like me to sing you a song instead?”
The response was deafening. “No!” They were beginning to climb Dumb Doma’s legs the way children climb apple trees.
“We’ll be overrun by the vermin any moment,” hissed the witch. “We’re lost.”
“Tell them a story,” said Cat.
“You tell them a story, I’m busy,” she snapped. She went to sit in her rocking chair and suck her thumb. The kitten was pretending to forgive the table. He was rubbing up against its hairy legs and purring.
Cat leaned out the window. “My babushka’s gone to have her afternoon nap,” she said. “You must be quiet, or she’ll wake up and eat you all.”
The children screamed with joy and fake terror.
“This is intolerable,” muttered the witch. “I’ve lost all credibility.”
“I’ll tell you a story. Why not,” said Cat.
“Better be a good one!” shouted a little girl.
“It’s the best,” said Cat. She searched in her mind for legends from the elegant storybook that her great-aunt had given her. She settled on the wonder tale of Tsar Saltan. She began to tell about the three beautiful sisters, and how the youngest one married the Tsar, but all her children were kidnapped by Baba Yaga and hidden in a chamber underneath a tree.
“Slander
. Actionable offense,” muttered the witch from behind Cat.
Outside, the hungry children had quieted down. “What next?” they asked.
So Cat continued, about how the Tsar eventually threw his young bride into the sea, in a casket made of wood, which floated away to a magic island.
“Now, that was foolish,” muttered the witch. “The casket ought to have been made of stone, so it could sink. Like a stone.”
There was a magic squirrel, it seemed, who cracked nuts of gold with his teeth. And a cat who lived in a magic crystal mansion.
“A distant relative, I think,” mewed Mewster.
“Magic cats! And squirrels! Ha. And magic ladles, no doubt,” hissed the witch, “and … and … and magic buttonhooks. Oh, and a magic telegraph pole, and magic, um, muskmelons. And enchanted piles of donkey manure. Very magic.” She was having fun, pretending not to listen.
Cat paid her no mind. She told the tale as well she could recall it. Catastrophe followed catastrophe, but eventually the Tsar was reunited with the young bride he had tried to murder, and their marriage resumed with peals of delight.
“No wonder they call these fairy tales,” said the witch. “Tolstoi would know better, and a fast train coming into a station would be involved. Blood, tears, regrets. All the fun stuff.”
But the children seemed satisfied. They might have preferred a basket full of dinner rolls or a fistful of rubles. But the story would see them through the coming night until the morning brought new promise. The story fed one hunger, anyway. And, really, thought Cat, how much more can we reasonably ask than that?
That night when everyone else was asleep, Mewster scratched the table legs till they bled. That kitten enjoyed a talent for revenge.
Sitting by her window, Elena watched the sun set through taffy-pulls of cloud stretching in from Scandinavia. The lengthy dusk in Saint Petersburg, she concluded, had to do with the use of electric lamps and gas lamps, inside and outside. The foreheads of buildings across the way glowed against the sky.