Elena’s throat had thickened. She couldn’t answer. She was distraught. The Prince handed her his handkerchief, but she felt too lowly to sully it. She put her sleeve to her eyes instead.
“Unless you prove to be involved in some campaign of treachery, Madame, I shall find your great-niece for you,” said the Tsar, without warmth. To his retinue, he continued, “Take the young offender into confinement. Escort the matron away. Haul her on that piece of furniture if you must.” His men did a few squat thrusts to prepare for the hoist of their lives.
Madame Sophia held out her hands. By her gestures, she might have been a fine opera singer. “I have died at the feet of our excellent sovereign and plunged into a pit of hell! None of this can be true! I have never seen the like!”
“Really?” said an approaching member of the court. “Then you haven’t seen anything yet, Madame Avoirdupois.”
Elena turned. Across the very floor of the river stepped Cat, at long last. The real Ekaterina. Not, as last seen, in a lambswool traveling coat cut to mid-calf, but in a gorgeous gown, with jewels like snow crystals at her ears and throat. By relativity of glamour, Elena was even more fully proven an impostor.
Cat was accompanied by a shriveled-up, grinning old harridan in a tight black skirt and generous bodice, with a jaw shaped like the shovel used by the Miersk gravedigger. “It’s been so long since I’ve crashed a party,” said Cat’s miniature chaperone. “Puts me in the mood to cast a curse or something.”
Cat walked up to Elena and looked her unblinkingly in the face.
Listen through the pause. Small waves are slapping at the sides of the floating reception platform. Elena is sniffling. The great-aunt’s breathing is labored, a leather bellows with a rip along one pleat. A raven on a post rearranges its torn wings.
“I don’t believe it,” said Cat at last. “You have stolen me.”
“You’d better pay your respects to the Tsar before you finish ruining my life,” replied Elena. She thought coldly, This is the only time I’ll ever have the chance to criticize Cat’s manners.
The other girl flushed. Anger or shame, maybe both. She turned and made a curtsey so deep that the skirt of her gown puffed out on all sides. “Your Highness,” she murmured, “I am the real Mademoiselle Ekaterina.”
Prince Anton applauded. “This is profoundly ripe drama. And who are you, the humble nanny who stole her away at birth?”
“I’ll humble you,” went the little woman, but Cat interrupted.
“Your Highness,” she began again, “I am Mademoiselle Ekaterina de Robichaux, great-niece of Madame Orlova. May I present my governess, Miss Yaga.”
“Glad to meet you, guv’nor.” Miss Yaga weaved and pranced, and jiggled her fingers at the Tsar’s court, which had drawn closer to this impromptu theatricale.
“Nothing of moment here. Take the lot away.” The Tsar managed a nod. His men came forward.
“But wait! We’ve arrived in time to deliver to your stable this fresh new bride,” said Miss Yaga. The Tsar’s men paused at the chaperone’s reply, momentarily elevating her authority over His Imperial Majesty’s. (Imagine.) “Is this the putative spouse-on-parade? He doesn’t look old enough to play tiddlywinks, let alone know enough about life to entertain thoughts of marriage.”
“I’m mature for my age,” said the Prince. “You’ve no call to say that. I am skilled in life. I know all about suffering from my Dostoyevsky and my Balzac.”
“You want suffering, I’ll kick you in your Balzac,” said Miss Yaga. “Anyway, I’ve come to have a conference with your godfather, so run along to your soldier bang-bang games.”
“Silence this creature,” said the Tsar, his voice growing ever more gentle and soft. But even now his armed guard hesitated.
“First things first. We’ve brought you that thingy. Cat, give it to Madame Apoplexy so she can hand it over to the kingpin.”
“Well. This night affords its surprises.” The Tsar lifted his left hand and once again the guards fell back a few steps. To Elena: “Liberty, only until this reunion is accomplished.” To Prince Anton: “I don’t suppose you arranged this melodrama for my entertainment?”
The Prince shrugged. “No, but what an excellent notion.”
The great-aunt was rubbing her eyes, trying to follow the train of events. Elena spoke through her resentment and mortification. “Dear Madame Sophia. However hard I tried to behave like a girl from London, I’m only a girl from the farms. In Miersk we apologize even for being alive, and that’s the deepest apology I can give you. I’ve stolen your affection and I’ve lied to you. I don’t ask for your forgiveness. I don’t deserve it.”
“Ma chérie, tell me which part of this is a dream and which is not,” ventured Madame Sophia. “I wish there were program notes. Still, I couldn’t read them anyway, what with my poor eyesight. So who can complain?”
“You can complain. It’s deeply Russian to complain,” said Miss Yaga. “But if it’s spectacles you need …” She withdrew from a beaded bag a cloth sleeve with the phrase Four-eyes! embroidered on it. “They’ll conform to your needs, or I’ll stamp upon them with my dainty heels — I promise.”
She extracted a little pair of wire-rimmed glasses that unfolded at the nose joint. “These once belonged to Galileo, if I’m not mistaken, and with them he saw the secrets of the stars. That’s stars, not ‘tsars.’ Myself, I rely on the trade journals.”
“Some Hotel Bedlam is missing a regular client,” whispered the Tsar.
“She speaks the nonsense of the sorely aged,” replied the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant.
“Shut up, you two,” said Miss Yaga. “I’m starting to remember why I prefer life in my own private hermitage.”
The great-aunt fixed the pince-nez upon her nose. Then she raised her recessed chins and peered through the lenses at Elena. To her credit, she didn’t recoil. But the grip of her fingers on the settee tightened. “By Saint Basil and Saint Cyprian. My agitated dreams were warning me, but I thought it was the zinc tonic.”
Next she regarded Cat, who had come to stand next to Elena. In the gaslight, even a half-blind raven could see that the two girls looked alike, especially when dressed expensively. But the ways they looked different were striking as well.
Ekaterina, Cat, named for Catherine the Great, stood with her neck erect, her eyes level, her face serene.
Elena, every bit as pretty, twisted her fingers, cast her eyes down. Marooned in this imperial cage, she became more rural by the moment.
Madame Sophia held plump, shaking hands to Cat. “Ma chérie, I didn’t even know you were missing. I didn’t suffer a whit. Thank goodness you are safe.”
“To quote a great sage, ‘Goodness had nothing to do with it,’” said Miss Yaga.
“She’s right,” said Cat. “Miss Yaga is my traveling companion and governess now. She saw me safely home, dear tante.” She yielded to her great-aunt’s embraces with a certain reserve, a reluctance to be on display.
“You can explain later,” said the great-aunt. “But if your parents ever learn of this —!”
“They’d laugh and open another bottle. But now, the gift. Miss Yaga?”
Miss Yaga came forward. The Fabergé egg was still in its pocket of straw and dung. “Cat gave it to me first, but I already have one just like it. Only better.” She didn’t curtsey. Why the Tsar didn’t have her arrested for insolence, he didn’t realize until later. But it isn’t only young ladies who charm.
Prince Anton did the honor of clawing open the batting. “It’s like a gilded rugby ball.” The size of his two hands clasped. The nest fell, more or less intact, to the carpet. He held up the gift. Its baroque curlicues gleamed, its jewels glistened.
“Oh my,” said the Tsar. “But it is porcelain, not cloisonné upon steel. A departure for Fabergé. Can this be genuine?”
Madame Sophia signaled to soldiers that they should hoist her back to her feet. “I asked the studio not to duplicate their methods used to create your famous collection
of eggs. That would be impertinent. Besides, the Tsar likes novelty, and I thought a porcelain egg would have a reticent sort of prominence of its own. By post, I directed the artisans myself. The separate windows show three beloved stories from Russian folk literature.”
The gift was center stage now. Even Miss Yaga fell silent, watching the Tsar receive his tribute.
Both girls stepped apart, and away from each other.
Cat couldn’t look at Elena now. By perpetrating the fraud, Elena had helped Cat and betrayed her at the same time. Elena, a mere acquaintance — there’d been no time to become true friends. Cat saw that clearly. So why should this reunion feel so abrasive? She didn’t know.
Nor could Cat bear to see her great-aunt’s face when she learned that one of the windows — the one with the Firebird — had been mysteriously changed.
Blinking, surely from the night wind, Cat swiveled her head and looked out at the black river, between the pavilions and the Winter Palace. She must have flinched, because, while all other eyes were on the gift, both Elena and Prince Anton turned to see what Cat had seen.
Dumb Doma was drifting alongside, downstream. Upon the ridgepole the kitten prowled back and forth, a sentinel, a shifting ballast, it was hard to tell.
No party guest was pointing and screaming. No one was shrieking. All eyes were trained on the Tsar and his gift, if near enough to see, or if farther away, on the comedy of comely men and glossy maidens brought to parade before one another. Adults all, they paid attention to adult life. They thought it was fun.
But Prince Anton turned to Cat, and then to Elena, and mouthed an O, meaning, roughly: What is that?
Elena glanced at Cat, who looked more chagrined than astounded.
The Tsar’s exclamations over his gift commanded their attention, so Dumb Doma, rotating in slow circles, passed on by unheralded.
“A Baba Yaga house,” he declared. “Such finesse. Look at those dragon carvings in the rafter beams, and each tiny talon on the house’s chicken legs! I’ve never seen the like.”
“And where are the skulls on stakes to serve as a single maiden’s security system?” asked Miss Yaga. “A little bloody mayhem to make it seem like home?”
Prince Anton revolved the gift so his godfather could squint into the next opening. “Aha. And here is the great ice-dragon.”
“I don’t know what that is,” said Prince Anton.
“A mysterious creature respected and feared by the Laplanders, those people who live north of Archangel and migrate back and forth between the mainland and Nova Zembla. Look at his teeth — there must be two hundred of them, separately carved.”
“Yes, that beast is wonderfully handled. Don’t you love his eyes? The emeralds are from an Ankara merchant. Baksheesh was involved.” Madame Sophia crowed, “Oh, do turn to the next; it’s the most splendid of all.”
Cat squeezed her eyes closed. The Prince revolved the great egg until the final window was opposite the slope of the Tsar’s regal nose.
“What is the meaning of this?” The great man’s voice was liquid iron.
What can you mean?” Madame Sophia’s knuckles, on both hands, flew to her lips.
“Is this some attack on our national pride? No story of Russian lore features a wasteland like this sorry scene. Is this supposed to be the Battle of Austerlitz? Some other tragedy of military shame?” His brow was dark.
“But —” Madame Sophia adjusted her new spectacles. “I instructed the studio to fashion a Firebird in the third frame….”
“This is no Firebird.”
Madame Sophia grabbed the fabulous gift back from him so she could peer closely and see what he was talking about. She nearly dropped it.
“This scene featured a Firebird in a spring woods. I requested it, I approved the design, I accepted the finished piece when it was brought from London for my review.”
Oh, but Prince Anton was enjoying this. “What does it look like now?” He meant to write a letter to the editor of Vedomosti, the Saint Petersburg newspaper, championing this troupe of actresses. They should all get raises.
The great-aunt said, “Who’s disfigured my gift? The green woods is a rotted forest in a standing swamp. A poisoned wilderness, no less than that. And the Firebird has been spirited away.”
Miss Yaga: “Nothing spirits away a Firebird. A Firebird is spirit incarnate.”
Madame Sophia rounded on Elena. “Could it be you, you changeling? You! You and your … your village cohorts? Did you do this to my tribute to the Tsar? Ruining my name, and that of my family? Arrest her!”
“She is already arrested.” The Tsar was beginning to sound tired.
“I had nothing to do with that,” said Elena hotly. “It was never in my possession. Your great-niece had it all the time. It’s her fault.”
“And she gave it to me,” said Miss Yaga.
“I don’t believe it. You stole it from her.” Madame Sophia turned her ire to Miss Yaga. “And you pocketed the lovely Firebird, fleshed with yellow diamonds and canary pearls, and somehow you did over the setting to hide your crime. Who are you, anyway? Some schoolmarm from that miserable hamlet called Miersk?”
“I don’t steal,” said Miss Yaga. “Be careful, my dear, with your accusations. I can be tetchy when aroused.”
It seemed to Elena, then, that the singular Miss Yaga grew. How? Not in stature. The intensity of her menace made her seem more lethal, more ancient. She looked the same, but she no longer seemed a harmless scold. More like an ambulatory bayonet stitched into a size-zero governess’s black uniform with yellow wrapper.
Cat pressed her hands together. “Miss Yaga, remember your station.”
Perhaps Prince Anton sensed a rising threat, too; he jumped in. “If the Firebird is missing, what about that huge eggshell we just saw? The false guest said it was a Firebird’s egg.” He pointed to Elena.
“That’s what I first thought. I was lost and far from home, and beside myself. I mistook some large snake egg for a Firebird’s egg. It was a passing fancy that I let myself believe. I know better now how little magic exists in this world.”
“Less and less by the hour,” snapped Miss Yaga. “Tell us what happened.”
“Well … at first I thought I’d found a Firebird in the forest. When I was trying to escape from the train — I did try to escape, you see,” she said in an aside to Madame Sophia and to the Tsar. “I plunged to grab the Firebird’s tail, to wish this mishap right again. As I neared the creature, a fox flushed a common farmyard hen out of the underbrush. The blasted hen nipped the tail feather before I could get to it. The Firebird expired and burned to ashes, and in its ashes appeared the egg. Which I took. Later, I believed I’d stumbled on an egg and only dreamed that Firebird part, out of fear and hope. I’d been prone to fancy, you see. I’m recovering from that. Still, I gave the woodland egg to the Tsar, in lieu of the Fabergé egg that had gotten, um, misplaced.”
“I knew it!” shouted Miss Yaga. “I knew there was something amiss with the Firebird. The Firebird breathes spirit, and the land lives; when the Firebird dies, the land dies with it! What do you think your little tchotchke is shrieking at you?” she said to the Tsar, pointing at the Fabergé egg. “Your country-land is sick.”
The Tsar listened. His manner didn’t change an iota; this is a skill of world leaders. But his words belied his stoic demeanor. “The other egg,” he said. “The one the impostor brought?”
“The envoy returned it to the treasury,” said Prince Anton. “Remember?”
“I will not suffer to have it touched again,” said the Tsar. “Let me go look at it myself.” To Miss Yaga: “You come with me.”
“We can candle it,” she said, “and perhaps see if the Firebird is arrested in there, unborn, or if this egg is the second fraud of the day.”
Candling an egg: holding it up before a candle to assess the glowing contents within. I considered this strategy in my study of light upon light, of influence of light.
Miss Yaga picked
up the discarded nest from the carpet and somehow stuffed it into her reticule. Then they strode, heel matching heel, the Tsar and — Elena was beginning to guess at her impossible identity — the witch. Side by side. Away from the throne carpet, along the chain of pavilions to the westernmost tent, the treasury.
Madame Sophia struggled to keep up. Elena and Cat took her arms, hauling her along. Prince Anton carried the Fabergé egg. The crowds parted in surprise and silence as the royal retinue made its hasty way.
At the row of six remaining soldiers behind the velvet rope (Prince Anton having been called away from his post), the Tsar paused.
“Has anyone been in the treasury tonight?” he asked the men.
“None but us, Your Excellency,” said the captain, a man of dignity and tonsorial excellence. “And your godson incognito among us, of course.”
“Guards are posted on the sides to make sure no one has approached from the water?”
“As you instructed us. All evening, sir.”
“Good. Bring me the common flecked egg, about so large”— he held out his hands, the length of a small loaf of bread — “that my envoy delivered here a short while ago.”
The Deputy Sub-Lieutenant arrived, panting, from a quadrille. He asked no questions, just arranged his hair to look competent.
The senior soldier returned in ten minutes. He had turned ghost-pale; he was sweating from under his moustaches into his collar. “I don’t know how to explain this to the Tsar. But the gift in question seems to be missing. Vanished. Vanished utterly.” He looked as if he expected to be vanished next.
Miss Yaga shoved him aside and entered the treasury. The Tsar and the Deputy Sub-Lieutenant followed her, and Cat and Elena and Prince Anton followed them. Madame Sophia, puffing, found a cedarwood stool from the Levant upon which to collapse.
Besides the mounds of wrapped presents — pots of heirloom roses from Persia, perhaps, or rare illuminated manuscripts, or useful lavatory soaps — a few genuine marvels stood out.