Anton paused in his retreat and gaped between the balusters.
Brother Uri took a step back. But the Tsar seemed untroubled by the intrusion of this small, urgent woman.
“Whatever diversion you’re planning for tonight, break it up,” she said. “We’ve got a serious problem, Mister Tsar of All the Russias.”
“I’ll see myself out,” said Madame Sophia in a husky whisper.
“You may as well stay. We might need common sense,” said Miss Yaga. “And I’m not sure the supreme ruler and all his advisors have a clue.”
“Oh, linger a moment,” said the Tsar to the great-aunt, and to Miss Yaga, “I thought you gave your notice last night?”
“I’m not here as a domestic but as a savage agent in my own right.”
“What are you on about, woman? Have you located the so-called Firebird’s egg that went missing?”
“I never saw the darn thing,” said Miss Yaga. “Though if I fell over it on my way to the loo, I would know it wasn’t a party trinket to fob off on the Tsar.”
“The woman’s lost her mind. I’ll summon the guards,” said the monk. It is easy to understand his confusion. Witches often work by confusion.
“Brother Uri. You might learn something. Let the woman speak,” insisted the Tsar.
“It’s my opinion that the Firebird is dying,” replied the newcomer. “I would say dead, kaput, but some magic is still alert in Russia and for all I know in several neighborhoods abroad, too. Perhaps he is paused in his cycle of life and death.”
“Just as I was saying,” interjected Brother Uri.
“How would a governess know about magic?” asked Madame Sophia, despite herself. That missing egg was, after all, not her prime concern.
“She’s no governess,” said Brother Uri. Miss Yaga may have lost her mind, but he had found his. “She is the witch.”
The Tsar wasn’t sure whether to be amused or alarmed. “The witch?”
“The same,” said Miss Yaga. As Anton watched, more slack-jawed than ever, he saw her pinwheel her arms. In an acrid backfiring of yellowish exhaust, the woman lost her snug sunshiny waistcoat and her padded shoulders. The neat hair, piled on her head under an off-center toque with a pheasant’s feather, exploded into a crinkly mass of dried beach grass. “Baba Yaga, arrived at court at last, and I wish this were a christening so I could cast a few good spells and have some fun, but honeybucket, we haven’t time.”
Brother Uri grabbed the arm of the Tsar and tried to rush him out of the room. The monk always had the Tsar’s well-being foremost in his heart. But the Tsar shook him off, scolding. “You’re a scholar of lights and shadows. Here’s a walking shadow. Pay attention.”
The witch continued. “In my understanding, Firebirds die and are reborn in a matter of moments. Pause the cycle, buster, and the whole experiment is off. Did that conniving peasant girl — Yelena, is she called? Elena?— actually find a Firebird’s egg? Or is that another lie? Frankly, I don’t know the little sinner.”
“I saw it,” said Madame Sophia faintly. “Well, I saw something.”
“That was before I gave you your new spectacles, if I’m remembering correctly. You might have seen a small watermelon whitewashed with lime. And no one else, apparently, looked at the thing closely.”
“I saw it,” said the Tsar.
“You’re a professional potentate, you couldn’t tell a goose egg from a gallstone.”
“I saw it, too,” called Anton.
The heads of the grown-ups turned: the Tsar, Brother Uri, Madame Sophia, the witch. Anton liked startling a quartet of grown-up authorities. “I lifted it out of its box. Remember?”
“Oh. An eyewitness,” called Baba Yaga. “You held it? What did it feel like?”
“An egg. I guess. I’ve never done my own cooking.”
“You might as well interview a signpost at a crossroads about which path to take,” muttered the Tsar. Anton was tempted to aim the paper aeroplane at his godfather’s head, but that might be viewed as an attempt at a coup.
“Signposts can be very conversational if you get them in the right mood,” said the witch. “Look, Prince Ants-in-Your-Pants, tell me one thing about that egg.”
“It felt … it felt warm.”
“So maybe it was the Firebird’s egg, after all,” said Madame Sophia. “Maybe Elena was telling the truth.” They all looked at her. “For once,” she amended.
“That’s no proof. There were gas lamps and braziers and about a thousand people there,” said Baba Yaga. “Even a corpse would have felt cozy with all that attention. No matter. I have a deeper concern to raise.”
Brother Uri came forward. “Witchcraft has no place in this court. This is a house of law,” he said. “It is a house of reason and of enquiry.”
“As an old friend of mine once said when I brought him some interesting brownies, ‘You must accept the truth from whatever source it comes,’” she replied. “Haven’t you read your Maimonides?”
“Who are you?” asked the Tsar.
“You know who I am. I am the larch root in the spring and the feverwort blossom in the fall. I am the forlorn echo in the dry community well. The tisane that can chase away the blues. I live in isolation for my own protection and for yours. And yet I’m flushed out into the open by a groveling child, some relative of this old hen, and I’m wasting time at the court of a human emperor who doesn’t know when his socks have holes in them. It’s an indignity. But I endure it because we are all in trouble.”
The Tsar’s hand on Brother Uri’s forearm kept him silent, but the monk was bristling. Professional jealousy. She was getting the Tsar’s ear in a way he had failed to do.
She hammered on. “This city is damper than Venice in a monsoon. The largest pastures in the world shrivel and die for lack of rain. Great Tsar, with your considerable resources, unseat this ill, and return our natural weather to us! For nature depends on magic, and magic on nature.” An aside to Anton up there: “It’s a which-came-first puzzle, like the chicken or the egg.”
Anton couldn’t help asking. “Which came first, the chicken or the egg?”
“The witch came first,” she replied.
“I can’t change the weather,” admitted the Tsar. “I can’t even change my own socks, as you have pointed out. My valet does that for me.”
“Well, what about you, master scholar?” asked the witch of Brother Uri.
“You don’t scare me,” he said. “And we’re working for the same team, you and I, so retire your superior tone or I’ll smack you on your nose.”
“Oooh, a live one at last,” said the witch. “And?”
“I’ve been trying to tell the Tsar for weeks that the problems are a question of influence. Something has come between the sun and the earth, to change the pattern of our wind and water, our winter and summer.”
“Something has come,” said the witch, “or something that was there has gone. And this has been going on for longer than the Firebird’s paralysis, assuming the child was telling the truth about having seen the Firebird die.”
“Elena Rudina is a confessed liar. Accused and sentenced as such,” the Tsar reminded them.
“Nonetheless, the young scoundrel may have twigged to something. Peasants are rooted in this land more deeply than Tsars,” the witch said over the emperor’s objections. “The truth is that she brought words to our conversation today, and today is where we find ourselves. The work of repair begins in common words owned commonly. Starting with the word help.”
“I’ve been studying the Firebird’s influence for decades,” said the monk.
“The winter sky won’t snow. The summer sky won’t stop raining. A world wound: rot and decay everywhere we turn. I still have some magic resources of my own, but for how long? We have to look for the cause somewhere. The question is, where?”
“Elena might know,” suggested Anton. “She’s the one who believed in the Firebird enough to rescue its egg. Ask her where to look for the source of this
world wound. It can’t hurt.” The boy’s remark was just faintly taunting.
“No one can speak to her. She’s in prison,” said the Tsar. “I forbid it.”
There followed a deep silence. Out of love for the Tsar and for all the Russias, the monk looked at the witch, looked away, looked back again. Some might have said it was right then, that moment: that’s when he began his descent toward sedition. An unholy alliance.
“Elena came into the imperial presence under an alias,” continued the Tsar. “Tantamount to treachery and betrayal. She could easily have had a pistol in her purse. Who knows what she might do next?”
“Oh, really. The idea! She’s a child,” said the great-aunt. “Miss Bristol said she had a doll in her purse, not a pistol.”
The Tsar began to walk out of the room. Without turning his head, he raised his right arm and pointed a finger in the direction of the gallery. “And you, young man, are supposed to be in your chamber. You are in serious hot water!”
“Don’t you understand?” said the witch. “We’re all in serious hot water. I’ll take on the quest of searching for the cause of the world wound, but I must know where to look. All directions are the same to me. Hailstones over Hoboken, you manage to misplace a Firebird’s egg, and Your Imperial Majesty is too haughty to ask a peasant girl for advice? And don’t leave while I’m talking to you. Who do you think you are? How did you even get this job in the first place?”
“Influence,” said the Tsar, and left.
Cat couldn’t sit down. She walked back and forth in the reception room overlooking the street, and then leaned against a French wallpaper that showed pagan temples in Elysian fields. Every eighteen inches, another pantheon in the greenery. A world lousy with ineffectual gods.
From here she could see who came and went through her great-aunt’s front door.
Monsieur d’Amboise, receiving a barrage of invitations for Madame Sophia to reveal all about her role in last night’s debacle, noticed the girl lurking. “I’d have thought you’d take to your bed all day. Tonight the high drama of the Tsar’s festival continues.”
Cat looked away. “I’m not going to attend.”
“I’m surprised you think you have any choice in the matter. Can I bring you a refreshment?”
She didn’t answer. He disappeared to his post below-stairs.
A short while later the front door opened. The driver entered, escorting Madame Sophia on his arm. “Thank you, Korsikov. That’ll be all. I’ll pause to catch my breath.” The great-aunt inched toward the side room, and she saw that Cat was waiting for her.
The girl bowed slightly. “I owe you an apology.”
“I accept your apology. Ooomph. I’m too old to be stirring things up with the Tsar. Drag over that little footstool so I can rest my — yes, that’s good. Will you ring for d’Amboise to bring me some water? There’s a good girl.”
Cat did as she was told, and then pulled a chair close to her great-aunt’s. “I was wrong not to think about the family in Miersk who took me in, however briefly. I was wrong and you were right.”
“That happens occasionally, my being right. What has changed your mind?”
Cat had asked herself the same question. “Ma tante, I know that you think I was being hysterical about Miss Yaga being the great witch.” At this Madame Sophia waved her hand: Bygones, bygones, I’ve moved on. “But in fact, now that she’s left, I realize that the ways she cared for me were motherly ways. I didn’t see this at first, having had so little exposure to my own mother.”
“I’m sure your mother means well,” said the great-aunt, insincerely.
“She nurses her drink better than she ever nursed me. No, I know motherliness, if I know it at all, through you.”
Madame Sophia almost relented. “Me? A woman who can’t identify an impostor in her nest? That’s hardly a textbook definition of mother.”
“Au contraire,” said Cat, “it’s the best definition. You took care of Elena as well as you’ve taken care of me. As well as Miss Yaga took care of me. Your concern for Elena extends even after her risky charade is exposed. That’s a measure of your character that I hadn’t been given chance to observe before.”
The great-aunt was silent. One mawkish tear slipped out from some dry old crease. “I will not risk sentimentality by commenting,” she brought herself to say. “I’m glad you are restored to me, Ekaterina. I wish I’d been able to liberate Elena, but I failed. Apparently she’s in prison for treason.”
“But all she was trying to do was help her mother.”
“As you point out, she succumbed to lying and impersonation. And in her own self-interest she ignored your plight. Had you not met Baba Yaga — yes, my dear, I know who Miss Yaga is, and I think I almost guessed last night — you might have perished in the forest.”
“Do you know where Elena is imprisoned?”
Madame Sophia sighed and began to prepare for the assault on the staircase to her room. She needed a nap. “Brother Uri Metchik, an advisor to the Tsar, seems to know how the palace works. I’m not privy to that information, and I left him muttering with the witch. All I know is that Baba Yaga will set out tonight to try to discover the cause of our floods and erratic weather. One thing leads to another: she might save the lost Firebird before he dies, unhatched, in embryo. Wherever he is.”
“Do you believe she can do this?”
“Ekaterina, I believe in heavy cream and good manners. I don’t know what else to believe. And Baba Yaga doesn’t know which way to turn. But once all good children are abed, she said, she leaves by riverboat from the Hermitage Bridge on the Winter Canal, beside the Winter Palace.”
Cat stood as her great-aunt hauled herself back onto her wobbly ankles. “Why didn’t my parents have more children after me?”
“Oh, my dear. Your parents hardly had you; they weren’t to be bothered by trying again. Now, get some rest. The second night of the festival starts at midnight. While I’d love nothing more than to stay home, our absence would suggest complicity in these affairs. I’d die of shame. Till midnight, then, ma chérie.”
Cat waited until her great-aunt had turned the corner of the first landing. Then she pushed open the door to the servants’ part of the house and descended to a great busy kitchen. She told the cooks to prepare a hamper with every sort of food they could spare. Breads, crackers, perhaps some cheeses; hams and sausages; pots of jam. The cooks, who had heard their own version of the previous night’s proceedings, thought Cat an apprentice witch, and scurried to do her bidding lest she change them all into French-speaking mice.
Then Cat ran up to her own chambers. Miss Bristol was sitting in the corridor, bent over some needlework. “I need your help,” said Cat. “I want you to take all these gowns my great-aunt had prepared for me — these, and these too — and find some place to sell them. Collect the money and entrust it to someone who can bring it to the Rudin family in Miersk, to thank them for attending to me.”
“That’s stealing,” said Miss Bristol hotly.
“You’re already in over your head. Do as I say,” insisted Cat. “I won’t need them. These coats, this hat.” She rummaged in her dresser for the warmest leggings she could find. She took everything useful and heaped it upon her bed.
“Are you mad? What are you doing?”
“I am rearranging my life. Summon Korsikov. Tell him he must have the carriage prepared for eight o’clock this evening. I am making amends.”
Monsieur d’Amboise paused at the open door and knocked at the jamb. “I believe you might be needing this?” He held a Gladstone bag aloft.
“How did you know?” asked Cat.
“I may not be a witch,” said Monsieur d’Amboise, “nor am I a mother. But I am a damn fine butler.”
Later, at the servants’ entrance to the house, Cat turned to them. “What will you say to Madame Sophia?”
“We will say,” said Miss Bristol, “that you have followed your great-aunt’s example of concern, and you have gone to
rescue the world.”
As Korsikov mounted to his box, the butler and governess passed the final parcels of food through the windows. Cat, through the open window of the carriage: “Why are you helping me?”
Miss Bristol shook in the rising cold. “Elena was never you, but we took care of her in your stead when you went missing. Wrong we may have been, not to sound the alarm, but we weren’t cruel. Now we’d help her if we could. We can’t. So we’re helping you.”
“That’s all that most of us who are not Tsars or witches can manage to do,” added Monsieur d’Amboise. “Take care of the one at hand. Here’s your scarf.”
He didn’t smile at Cat. He said, “Jane, you’ll catch your death.”
So Miss Bristol has a first name, thought Cat. Imagine. All this time, I never thought to ask. And he probably does, too. I wonder what it is.
As the carriage pulled out of the forecourt, Cat squirmed around to see them, possibly for the last time. They weren’t waving. They’d turned back toward the house. Monsieur d’Amboise had his arm around the shaking shoulders of Miss Jane Bristol. In the lighted doorway, there was a second valise that Cat thought she had left behind. Then she wondered if that was a suitcase packed for the butler and the governess, and if they were rescuing each other, tonight, together.
And what of Elena, that opportunist, that fraud?
It still pains me to dwell on the imprisonment of any creature. I shall make as swift work of this section as I can.
Elena concluded that the Saint Petersburg House of Solitary Confinement was inaccurately named. The room into which she’d been thrown wasn’t the bastion of solitude she might have expected.
For one thing, three rats either lived in the corner or they were passing through on their way to cheerier lodgings. Their eyes were beads of molten iron.
The chill of underground: a clammy weather evoking no season in nature. The air filled with the reek of mildew. The flat pillow on the cot felt coolly furred, the pelt of a dead pet.