She could hear him stalk away and leave the carriage. The kitchen and storerooms must be forward. Elena rose, rushed the tray out into the hallway, then tidied up the coverlet and pillows onto which she had fallen, senseless, the night before.
He was back shortly. He remarked through the closed door, “If you’re presentable, I’ll enter with your tray.”
“No,” she said.
“Touchy this morning. Perhaps you are getting a case of jitters about meeting the Tsar and his godson?”
“I told you, I have a cold. I don’t want you to catch it.”
“If I didn’t catch my death from those diseased peasants, I shan’t be afflicted by some well-bred virus of yours, Mademoiselle Ekaterina. Now, mind you don’t pester Miss Bristol. I shall be forward till luncheon, but I hope your breakfast affords you some pleasure.”
“Thank you,” she thought to say, but she wasn’t sure if he heard it. When he was gone, she dragged the cart back into the room. A funny little curved puff of bread, airier to chew than anything she had ever had before. And a lump of butter and a pot of jam made of bitter orange rind. She ate the butter in one bite and drained the jam out as if it were thickened yogurt. This time she did not throw up. And she felt a little sharper, for the first time in weeks.
Miss Bristol was in her own private room. Monsieur d’Amboise was gone for the morning. She had time to think. To plan.
She brushed her hair and tried to pin it up again. With more of her neck exposed, the way Cat wore her hair, she looked more like Cat than ever. She changed her clothes, an outfit of green, soft rain on willows in summer.
The pretty shoes were too large until Elena stuffed into their toes some filmy items of apparel, the use of which she couldn’t imagine. Then she tried walking in small steps about the chamber, holding her hands the way an elegant lady from Saint Petersburg might.
“Oh!” came the voice of the old great-aunt. She called out something in French, and then again, and finally in Russian, “On my word, Ekaterina, come here at once! I am in grave need of your assistance.”
Elena creaked open the door and peered to the right. Down the passage, through the vestibule. The door to the sitting room was swung wide open, and the room was sunk in a gloom darker than the rest of the carriage. Elena saw one stockinged foot resting upon a bolster of dark velvet, and an old hand like a thick bloated crab patting about the skirts. “I have lost my eyes, do come at once.”
Perhaps the breakfast gave Elena a courage she didn’t usually have. Or perhaps it was the spirit of her father encouraging her. The morning is wiser than the night, as Grandmother Onna always said.
The worst, Elena supposed, was that they would discover her and push her off the train into the next lake, and she would drown. At least then she would be with her father again.
Drawing a deep breath, Elena put her hands on her heart and then on her head, to check the arrangement of her hair, and she stepped forward into her mirror life.
Now that she needed to see this new world, she took the time to look.
The parlor room occupied the entire back half of the carriage. It felt like a giant carved cabinet turned inside out. Wood scrollwork on every wall and door, flourishes of flopping wooden foliage that I imagine were acanthus leaves, though Elena wouldn’t have known that. Most of the furniture was secured in place with bolts through the Bokhara. The room clearly served as the great-aunt’s bedchamber too, as an Empire divan was beached in one corner, blue velvet pillows heaped upon it.
The room chattered to itself. A great many prisms, hanging off loops of ormolu, shivered and knocked. They cast no rainbows; the drapes were drawn tight as the gates of the Kremlin. In one corner, a canary tried to sing a complaint about her dusky incarceration but gave up after a few bars.
Great-Aunt Sophia hunched in her stuffed chair, which was one of the few liberated items. She was a huge leathery bellows of an old cow wallowing in silken circumstance. In the gloom, she said, “There you are. What is all this about, speaking Russian? Don’t you know that the imperial family prefers to speak in French? That’s all they’ve spoken for two hundred years. Russian is for the servants.”
“Russian is the mother tongue of Russia.” Elena spoke softly.
“Harrumph. A conceit. Well, I suppose you’re bored, all that long delay. And there are worse ways to misbehave. In any case, Monsieur d’Amboise told me you had a cold, and I hear that it must be true. You have a frog under your tongue today. Now, ma chérie, I have misplaced my spectacles again. They have fallen on the floor, and as the lamp has just run out of oil, of course I can’t see to find them.”
Elena knew what spectacles were because the doctor had had some until he sat on them one day. The old woman’s spectacles were right there on the side table, laid beside a book. The oil lamp hadn’t run out; it just wanted trimming.
The girl approached the old woman, who was squinting and grunting and trying to feel between the cushions upon which she was planted. As she was stout, there wasn’t room to get her hand in between her hip and the upholstered side of the chair. She wheezed and winced and swore in French.
Elena circled behind the chair. While Great-Aunt Sophia was leaning to the left, Elena came up behind her on the right and covered the spectacles with her hand. She slipped them into the pocket of Cat’s cloud-green dress.
“I wanted to pick out a book for you to read to me,” said the old lady. “But you know my eyes. It is too dark to see, and my eyes are not good in any case.”
“I can increase the light a little.”
“Very well. And then take this book and read at the marked page.”
But Elena couldn’t read well in any language. She put her trembling hands upon the dial of the hanging lamp. She turned it a fraction, raising the wick, so the room brightened but by a feeble amount. The mound that was Great-Aunt Sophia took on a highlight of sulfurous yellow. The old woman waited, laced and lassoed in a dark tufted dress, one hand splayed across the bosom like an infant pup trying ineffectually to nurse through the napery. Her hair was industrial nickel, swept up to the crown of her head and nailed into place with hairpins. She smelled of a root vegetable as dressed with an attar of roses.
In her heart Elena applied to the spirit of her father to give her inspiration, and perhaps it did. She moved across to the swinging door and said, “If you wait a moment, I’ll get something from my room.”
“I shall remain here. I have no intention to go air-ballooning at present.”
Elena slipped down the passage. She returned with Cat’s colorful storybook in her hand. “I will tell you a story,” she said daringly to the great-aunt.
Madame Sophia had put her head back on her pillows, and her eyes were closed. She waved her hand as a sign for the story to start.
Elena pulled up a low stool and sat at the old lady’s knees. She turned to the story she knew best, the one about Vasilissa the Fair and her visit to the old witch in the forest, dreadful Baba Yaga.
She began to present the history as she might have arranged it in the bed-nook theater. Vasilissa was sent into the woods by her wicked stepmother to petition the old witch in the woods for help. The witch lived in an izba that stood on two enormous chicken legs. Around her house was a fence of stripped saplings, topped here and there with the skulls of children she had eaten. A wicked light spilled through their empty eye sockets.
Elena had just finished with the description of Vasilissa meeting the witch when the old woman spoke up. “Very luscious in the telling, Ekaterina. Did you learn this story from that child on the railway platform?”
“Yes.” This, at least, was hardly a lie. And then Elena dared to add, “Yes, ma tante.”
“I suppose the joy of conversation and story made Russian the more appealing tongue for the moment. I’ll grant you that you tell it well in Russian, all those little slips of grammar. Very convincing. Well, go on.”
By the time Elena had reached the end, the old woman had nodded off to sleep. Th
e girl turned the lamp down low again and tiptoed back to her bedchamber — she was already beginning to think of it as hers — with Cat’s storybook in her arms and the great-aunt’s spectacles still in her pocket.
The truth was this: despite promenading in Kensington Gardens, rain or shine or British bank holiday or, Lord help them all, Mothering Sunday with nary a mother in sight, Cat wasn’t the most energetic child.
She’d had so little practice. She’d never been allowed to scuffle like the urchins she saw in the mews of London. She had envied them their freedom to roam, those guttersnipes straight out of Dickens. Skulking, nicking apples off market stalls. Caps down, heels worn. Eyes, when you could catch them, canny beyond their years.
Nor had Cat been allowed to roll hoops or chase yipping lapdogs through the Luxembourg Gardens like Gavroche or some other liberated gamin in Le Quartier Latin. She’d only learned to pace the garden paths, shoulder to shoulder next to her assigned partner — most often Susanna van Stockum of Sneek, a broad and wheezy Frieslander who wept at the very thought of exercise.
Still, traveling the Russian hinterland by following the rail line wasn’t tough. No steep climbs, for one thing. A train prefers to zig and zag along a gradual incline.
She reached the trestle bridge and saw where it had been repaired with new green-blond logs. She crossed it, left it behind. She was surprised not to come upon other towns or farmsteads. Either Miersk had been the last tiny village before the great forest or the forest had become enchanted.
What a droll notion. She must be more tired than she realized.
Walking kept her warm. Only when the sun began to hover westward did she realize she didn’t know what to do next. She’d expected the train by now. Or at least someone useful to emerge and offer help. She’d even be glad to meet the peasant girl, what was her name?— Elena. Maybe she’d have jumped the train and even now was nearby, wandering home.
As the woods lost their pleasant particularity, and as a return of the desolation threatened, she tried to imagine company. Here was Susanna van Stockum of Sneek, dragging along beside her. No, hours ago Susanna would have sat down by the side of the tracks and died.
How about her great-aunt? But Madame Sophia was too fat and old and weary of ankle. And Cat didn’t want the governess. Miss Bristol had no gumption.
For a short while, she tried to pretend her parents were with her. One on either side, how is that? Pater with his moustaches, Mother with her lapdogs. The lapdogs would have fallen off the trestle bridge, though. Without the lapdogs, Mother was impossible to conjure. And Pater. Cat knew only his knees and the back page of his racing forms; his face was less distinct. Even in her imagination, they wouldn’t come to her aid: they were otherwise engaged.
Cat then went back to Elena. She had some spunk and minded the world.
But poor Elena, really? That’s the best you can do, Cat? Elena hadn’t shown the guarded alertness of streetwise brats. Instead, a rural vapidity. Sweet, if dim. She seemed actually to believe in witches. No doubt she’d have bought the whole gamey portfolio they peddled to kids in England: Father Christmas, as they called him in London. Jack Frost. Little Cinderella squatting in a rotten pumpkin shell. And fairies at the bottom of the garden, if Elena could even recognize such a fantastic concept as a garden. Now, if Cat ever saw anything that looked like fairies at the bottom of the garden, she’d set her great-aunt’s Russian wolfhounds upon them. Cat laughed, imagining Ivan the Terrible and Ivan the Even Worse loping through the Jardin des Tuileries, corpses from the root-and-hedge society bleeding out of their slobbery mouths.
But maybe, thought Cat, maybe Elena isn’t as innocent as she looks. Why hadn’t she instructed the engineer to turn the train around and return? Maybe Elena’s naïveté was a ruse, and Cat had fallen for it.
Oh, for company, she thought. All right: I’d even accept Miss Bristol, plagued with alarums as she is. Then Cat began to sense movement to one side, in the woods.
She whistled to herself. She wasn’t a robust tunesmith, but perhaps whatever she was sensing objected to atonal whistling and might skulk away, offended.
“Elena?” she called, just in case the girl had actually escaped the train and gotten lost in the woods to one side. Though following tracks seemed elementary.
She called again, louder out of a growing fear. “Elena! Elena?”
A voice came back: “Elena!— lena?” Cat understood the logistics of echo. Still, alert to a nameless energy on the prowl, she felt unmoored. She wasn’t Elena, no matter how the echo voice addressed her. Though by now her skirts were dirty and her stomach growling, and her hair unknotted and brambly as a peasant’s.
She was Cat. Cat! she thought. “Cat!” she cried.
“Cat,” returned her voice, panicky. By now she was all but running.
Why had she let her great-aunt talk her into leaving London and traveling halfway across the world to meet a distant scion of the imperial family of Russia? Now Cat would be devoured by a beast as ravenous as those grubby villagers. No one would find her body. No one would ever find the Fabergé egg near her well-chewed bones. Tinkling a little funereal lullaby.
The world was flinching, rippling in place. A local wind, revising the law of gravity, shirred the gluey shreds of last autumn’s leaves and pine needles into the air. Though she wasn’t a religious child, she called upon Saint Nicholas to help her. Saint Nicholas didn’t oblige.
The leaves resolved into a shape she began to understand. Whatever it was, it was … it was … cat-like.
She had summoned it. She had called “Cat!” and it had come into being.
A real cat, a large, wild thing. Its pelt scarred by a scrabble with another creature. A look of golden longing in its eye. It hung low to the ground, like all cats on the prowl, and it moved toward her and then stopped, growling.
Its face an exotic blossom of fur. She didn’t know what species might haunt the Russian woods. A mountain lion, a snow leopard, a tiger. An Abyssinian ocelot.
“You don’t want me,” said Cat.
The cat wasn’t convinced. It paced slowly, driving Cat off the tracks and into the woods.
“If it was whistling that annoyed you, I’m sorry.”
The cat was playing with her. It was pushing her farther from the safety of the rail line. Paper birches and spruces closed in, rock skittered underfoot. Thorny brambles at hip and elbow. The ground skipped and rose as if it couldn’t make up its mind on a preferred surface level. Almost at once she lost her bearings.
For a length of time that, later, the girl could never name, the soft-padded monster drove her through the forest. Finally it seemed to tire of the game, and capered directly at her, picking up speed as it neared.
She screamed and turned her back, imagining its claws driving into her scalp. She raked her way through a stand of cane, through translucent slush and puddles the color of mud.
Quite suddenly she came upon the edge of a small bridge. In the middle of nowhere, no path leading up to it. The span was painted in green and red, carved with totems she didn’t pause to examine. At the end of both railings, on near and far sides, stood a pole — four poles in all. Each pole was capped with an ivory sculpture shaped like a human skull. A jaundiced light flickered from the eye sockets of each skull.
Cat threw herself upon the bridge and fell on all fours. The egg in its apron-satchel thumped against her spine.
The cat stopped, hissing. It didn’t step foot on the bridge. Perhaps it wouldn’t.
Cat straightened up onto her knees. The bridge was a walkway to an independent island of private climate. Before her, a landscape of perfect old-fashioned winter. How could it persist adjacent to the mess of the thaw all around it? Heaps and drifts of snow coated the branches of trees, outlining them, pressing them down.
Underneath the bridge gleamed a frozen stream, clear as glass. Behind her, in the woods through which she’d come, the big cat paced back and forth.
The light was lowering still. H
er desolation hour. She glanced over the side of the bridge, in her hysteria expecting a cousin tiger, or perhaps trolls. What she saw was her face in the ice. Scratched, smudged with dirt and a little blood. Her hair had come loose from its pins. Her lambswool collar was awry. She looked like a peasant — indeed, almost like Elena.
She paused, halfway on the bridge from here to there.
Elena managed to spend the rest of the day in her chamber.
Cat’s chamber.
Her chamber.
Monsieur d’Amboise came by with lunch, and then again with some supper.
“Your great-aunt says your voice sounds like death stew on the boil, but she told me you felt well enough to come read to her,” he called through the closed door. “Why won’t you come out and join her for her evening meal?”
“I’ve taken a turn for the poorly,” she said, a phrase that Grandmother Onna used when she was getting ready to go on an all-day ramble for medicinal mushrooms.
“Hmmmm,” replied the butler. He didn’t sound convinced. Still, he left her yet another sumptuous tray. This time the dome revealed a plate of sausages, fennel, and white beans, all swimming in a savory juice of herbs and wine. She cleaned the plate so thoroughly, she could see her face in it as she licked the last morsel and splash.
When Monsieur d’Amboise came to take the tray away, he called through the door, “Miss Bristol remains under the weather. Has the meal revived you enough to grace us with your company?”
“No.” She tried to sound faint, though she hadn’t felt so healthy in months.
“I must remark that for a girl who feels iffy, your appetite has tripled. I’ve never seen you finish your meals like this before.”
“Hmmmm,” she said, throwing his skeptical one-note melody back at him. Still, she took stock. She’d have to mind herself carefully or she’d make an error, and all would be lost.