Miss Blaine's Prefect and the Golden Samovar, page 20
“Well, I can assure you she didn’t go to the schoolmaster,” I said confidently. “She was with me from the time we arrived in the village until I went to see the schoolmaster, and she was dead by the time I got back. She couldn’t have…” Then I paused, uncertain, remembering the visitor.
The priest noticed my hesitation and was on it like a ferret up a kilt. “What have you failed to tell me?”
“The schoolmaster did have a visitor, somebody who wanted something written. But it was a man.”
The priest gave a nasty smile. “Someone sinful enough to take her own life would not hesitate to disguise herself.”
“Really, I’m sure it wasn’t her.” But my certainty was wavering. I clutched at another argument.
“I’ve just remembered something else. I was walking past the pond just now, and somebody tried to drown me. That’s why I’m looking a bit bedraggled. He had a beard and I grabbed it and it came away in my hand. The big sinister man had a beard. It could have been fake. So that proves it was me he was trying to murder in the first place.”
Even to me, it sounded far-fetched.
The priest shook his head. “What a remarkable capacity for delusion you have. I advise you to go home and repent.”
“I know you’re not totally convinced, but could you not make an exception just this once? Go on. Nobody need know.”
The priest raised an accusatory arm. “Now I know you for what you are! You are the Evil One, sent to tempt me!”
“Now who’s got a remarkable capacity for delusion?” I demanded. “I haven’t exactly got a forked tail and cloven hooves.”
The priest shook his head. “The Evil One can take many forms to deceive us. I know of a priest in town who was summoned by one of the finest families to discuss the sacrament of baptism. As soon as he saw the infant, he knew. ‘You have been deceived into thinking that this is an innocent new-born babe,’ he said, ‘but it is the Evil One himself. I have never been in the presence of such evil. You must destroy it immediately.’”
I was indignant. “Destroy a wee baby? I’ve never heard anything so outrageous!”
“It was the embodiment of every diabolic wickedness. As soon as it heard the priest’s words, its eyes glowed red and it vomited green bile.”
I was going to tell him that his colleague had been conflating The Omen and The Exorcist when I remembered that cinematography didn’t emerge until the 1890s. A book might make its way through the ether, but it was unlikely that an entire home cinema system would.
“So what happened?” I asked.
“This was a righteous, God-fearing family, so of course they destroyed the child. Had they kept it, it would have cunningly learned to control its outward appearance so that nobody knew of its inner iniquity. Much the same as you have done.”
The whole thing sounded to me like a priestly urban myth. But this man was so rigid in his views that nothing would ever persuade him he was mistaken. Despite my best efforts, I had been unable to come up with a convincing story. For once, I was going to have to admit defeat. I stood up to leave.
“Yes, go. Who do you think you are, to come and disturb me?” snapped the priest.
“Just someone trying to do a little good as I pass through, Padre,” I said. “Long story short, not only am I not of your faith, I’m not of your country. I’m from Scotland.”
“Scotland?” The priest looked alarmed and crossed himself. “The land of John Knox?”
“That’s the bunny. Sorry, that’s just an expression. Not appropriate in this case, since he wasn’t exactly cuddly and fluffy. More like a raging lion, seeking whom he could devour.”
“That is from the scriptures! You know the scriptures?”
“I know more or less everything,” I said. And then I felt I had to elaborate, remembering the litany of the maid’s alleged sins. “That’s not the sin of pride, by the way, it’s a simple statement of fact. I had a very good education. Oh, listen, you’ll like this one—a minister is preaching to his flock, and he says, ‘Miserable sinners that you are, you’ll all be burning in the fires of hell and suffering agonising torments, and you’ll look up at the Almighty in heaven, and you’ll say “Lord, Lord, we didn’t know!” And the Lord will look down upon you and in his infinite mercy and compassion, he’ll say, “Yes, well, you know now.”’”
I waited for the priest to laugh, but he was just staring at me, his eyes bulging.
“Just a wee Presbyterian joke there,” I explained. “It’s actually a lot funnier when you hear it in Scots but I didn’t know how to translate it.”
He crossed himself. “John Knox! Presbyterianism! How can I save my flock?” he moaned.
“Sorry?” I said.
“What can I do to persuade you?” he gabbled. “I will do anything, anything at all, if you leave my humble, insignificant parish in peace, and proselytise elsewhere. There is a much more wicked parish in the village of Y—, not fifty versts from here.”
I leaned back in my chair and stared thoughtfully into the middle distance. “Oh, I don’t know about that,” I said. “I’m on a mission to convert the whole country. I wouldn’t be doing my job properly if I left this bit unpurified.”
“Please, I beg you, there must be some way I can persuade you to pass us by?”
I pondered. “No, don’t think so. Right then, I’m off to call a meeting in the village hall, and judging by my past results, they’ll all be good Calvinists by the end of the day. Bye, Reverend. Nice meeting you.”
I hadn’t got halfway to the door before the priest cried, “Wait! I implore you—what if I hold a funeral for the maid?”
I wrinkled my nose. “The maid? I’m not really bothered about her any more. I’ll just get on with my converting.”
“I will give her the finest funeral anybody has ever seen,” coaxed the priest. “Everyone will attend.”
“Absolutely everyone?” I said.
“I swear it on the holy icon of Saint Basil the Blessed, Fool for Christ.”
“Including her mum and dad and sisters and the schoolmaster and his wife?”
“All of them!”
“Even if they don’t want to come?”
“I will threaten them with excommunication if they are not present.”
“I really shouldn’t…but all right,” I said.
I had promised the maid another three roubles when she had successfully convinced the countess’s household that I was a princess. She had fulfilled her part of the bargain. I handed a banknote to the priest.
“Here’s three roubles. Organise her a nice catafalque and keep the change.”
The priest crossed himself and clasped his hands in prayer. “And you promise that if I do all this, you will leave us in peace and unconverted?”
“I’ll be off on the first train tomorrow morning, your Autocephalousness,” I said. “Pleasure doing business with you.”
When I got back to the house, I found everyone was dressed in mourning, which I thought was really nice, considering they all claimed they didn’t like the maid.
“That was quick,” I said. “How did the message reach you so fast?”
“The message came by the speediest horse available.” It must have come along the main road while I went back through the woodland path. “But how did you find out, madam?”
“I got it straight from the horse’s mouth,” I said. I thought it was a pretty good joke, but the housekeeper looked baffled. The idiom must be different in Russian.
“It’s just an expression,” I said. “Anyway, I’m glad you all know. It sounds as though it will be a spectacular funeral, with everybody there. More of a celebration really.”
The housekeeper stifled a gasp, and I reflected that the concept of a funeral celebrating a life well lived or, in the maid’s case, a life tetchily lived, was probably not yet generally accepted.
“Sorry, I shouldn’t have said that.”
“I’m honoured that you feel able to speak so freely in front of me, madam,” said the housekeeper.
“And I’m happy you’re honoured. Anyway, I’m leaving first thing tomorrow, so I’ll just go and pack.”
“But you have no maid, thanks to my wretched daughter’s thoughtlessness. Let me come and help you.”
The housekeeper proved quick and efficient, cast in the same mould as Old Vatrushkin.
“Such a tragedy, such a tragedy,” she muttered. “Your poor fur coat.”
“You know what would be nice?” I said. “I think the maid should be buried in it.”
“That beautiful coat in an unmarked grave? Excuse me, madam, but how could you suggest such a thing?”
I stopped in the middle of folding up an afternoon dress. “But it’s not an unmarked grave. She’s having the finest funeral anybody has ever seen, remember?”
The housekeeper dropped a spare pelisse. “The priest has agreed?”
“Of course,” I said. “That was what I was talking about when I came in. What were you talking about? Why are you all in mourning?”
“Why, madam, because the count is dead.”
CHAPTER
11
“Dead?” I repeated. “Another duel?”
The housekeeper shook her head. “The countess’s bust.”
“Ah well,” I said, remembering how the general had got wedged in her cleavage, “I suppose he died happy.”
“His skull was split open like a watermelon,” said the housekeeper. “They think he dropped his pen on the study floor and when he went to pick it up, he accidentally nudged the table and dislodged the bust.”
The marble bust. I had been in the count’s study. I had seen that bust. I had tried to move it and I knew it couldn’t be dislodged accidentally. The count must already have been lying helpless on the floor when someone dragged the bust to the edge of the desk and let it fall on him. This had been deliberate. But who would want the count dead?
“Tell you what,” I said. “You’ve been working so hard at sorting out my packing. Why don’t you sit in that easy chair and we’ll have a nice glass of tea together.”
I summoned the serving maid, who poured the tea and gave us each a dessert bowl filled with kutia, a delicious cracked wheat and poppy seed pudding that always goes down well at Russian funerals.
I took a spoonful. “I’m sorry I can’t stay for your daughter’s send-off,” I said.
The housekeeper snorted. “You’re lucky. We’ve had a message from the priest telling us we’ve all got to be there. Still, at least there’s more pudding to look forward to.”
The serving maid had now left and I felt able to speak confidentially. “I sort of gave you a bit of a wrong impression when I arrived. The countess doesn’t actually know I’m here.”
“I don’t understand, madam. Then how could the countess have given you her maid to accompany you?”
“Because the maid wasn’t her maid any more—the countess emancipated her.”
The housekeeper’s hand flew to her mouth. “No!”
“Yes, and then I gave her a job.”
“She became your serf? And you allow her to be buried in your beautiful coat? You are truly the kindest owner anyone could wish for! On behalf of my wretch of a daughter, I thank you.”
“Speaking of owners, how do you find the countess?”
The housekeeper’s lips tightened. “She is a monster. She cares for nothing and nobody. She came from a country family and married the count only in order to win status and position and live in town. She blamed her husband for the unfortunate incident we are forbidden to speak of that obliged them to live in the country. She never forgave him, and she made all our lives a misery. It was a blessing for us when he was finally pardoned and could go back to town.”
“Still, that’s pretty rough, having to wait twenty years for a pardon.”
“He would never have bothered asking if it hadn’t been for her,” said the housekeeper. “Nag, nag, nag, say you’re sorry to his imperial majesty, and after twenty years of her going on and on about it every day, he finally cracked and apologised. The tsar sent him the most generous reply imaginable: he said he’d realised just afterwards that he’d mistaken a nine for a seven and that the count hadn’t cheated at all. And now that the count had apologised for his outrageous insolence, he could come back to town any time he liked.”
I stopped eating the kutia. “So you’re telling me he needn’t have been in exile here for twenty years? If he’d apologised at the time, he could have stayed in town? More to the point, the countess could have been living in town twenty years ago?”
“Exactly.”
“She must have been livid.”
The housekeeper shuddered. “It was horrible.”
“Do you think she was angry enough…to murder him?” I waited to let my words sink in.
The housekeeper paled. “She was certainly remarkably cross.”
I leaned forward confidentially. “She couldn’t get rid of him before now. She needed him to be unexiled so that she could install herself in their palace in town. You should see it, by the way.”
“I can imagine,” said the housekeeper. “That woman wouldn’t know good taste if it was floating in her borshch.”
“Then,” I went on, “once they were in town and she was launched into polite society, she didn’t need him any more.”
The housekeeper nodded. “Murdering her husband sounds exactly the sort of thing she would do. She’s a most unpleasant woman.”
“And then of course there’s Sasha.”
The housekeeper stifled a guffaw.
I hadn’t even said protégé. “I don’t think that’s a very appropriate response,” I said tartly. “Manipulating someone for your own ends, it’s not decent.”
“Maybe not, but it was still very funny watching him get the countess to take him to town. He played her like an accordion.”
“Pardon?” I said.
“Yes, it was the pardon. The instant Sasha discovered the count had been pardoned, that was it. The maid didn’t stand a chance.”
“Sorry?” I said.
“The maid. My wretched daughter. The one nobody liked. The one he seduced.”
“No!” I said. This was impossible.
“Yes. He used her to get to the countess. Being the maid’s lover gave him an excuse to hang around here and he was always putting himself in the countess’s line of sight. Lumbered with a misery guts like the count, of course she was going to fall for a handsome young lad like him.”
“But that’s not how it was,” I protested. “The countess groomed him. He was her passport into society.”
“And she was his passport into society.”
This was making no sense at all. “So did he work far away in the fields?” I asked.
“Why would he work in the fields?”
“Bringing in the harvest?” I suggested. “Planting maize? Sorry, I haven’t really paid attention to what kind of fields you have round here.” Whatever type of serf he had been, he couldn’t have worked in the house or he wouldn’t have needed the maid to get himself noticed by the countess. And how on earth had he learned to read and write so quickly?
“Bless you, madam, the schoolmaster’s son doesn’t work in the fields,” the housekeeper said.
It must be some sort of couthy aphorism, denoting acceptance of the status quo and condoning class privilege. “We’re all the children of Jock Tamson,” I rejoined.
We stared at each other for a while. Then, slowly, so that she would understand, I said, “I was just wondering what kind of serf Sasha is.”
And equally slowly, she responded, “Sasha is not a serf, he is the son of Dmitri Dmitrievich, the schoolmaster.”
“I’m talking about Sasha,” I said. “Blond hair, blue eyes, chiselled cheekbones, totally stunning.”
She nodded.
The schoolmaster’s wife had talked about her son, Aleksandr Dmitrievich. The pet name for Aleksandr was Sasha. It seemed we were indeed talking about the same person. This was good news. Lidia had said she would be prepared to marry a serf for love, but a schoolmaster’s son must be a few rungs up the social ladder.
The housekeeper had, however, got one thing terribly wrong. It was quite impossible that someone so guileless and transparent as Sasha could have considered seducing the maid and the countess. He was the victim here. I wouldn’t put it past the countess to have set up the maid as a honey-trap, although that just proved what a poor judge of character she was.
“Right,” I said, finishing off the last spoonful of pudding, “let’s get on with the packing.”
“May I ask one last thing, madam?” asked the housekeeper. “Why did the countess emancipate my wretch of a daughter?”
I hesitated. It was wrong to speak ill of the dead—but it was also important to tell the truth.
“I’m afraid your daughter was chasing after the count.”
The housekeeper shook her head. “Never. She was cheeky, lazy, greedy, sulky, snobbish and churlish. But she wasn’t dopey.”
The housekeeper certainly was, with these crazy theories about Sasha. Thank goodness I was there to separate fact from fantasy.
But I still felt I hadn’t quite worked out everything. On the train back to town the next morning, I sat back on the sofa, listening to the soothing rumbling of the journey, and letting my subconscious take over from my rational mind. You can get so far with rationality, but the subconscious is not to be sneezed at. I half-dozed, half-meditated as the versts went by, five, ten, fifteen, twenty. Twenty.
I sat bolt upright. Of course. All had become obvious, just as Miss Blaine had said it would. Sasha was twenty. The countess had got married twenty years ago. The countess was Sasha’s mother. I was slightly hazy on the precise details, but since Sasha didn’t live with the countess, he must have been the result of an indiscretion before the countess married the count. She had placed her baby with parents who lived nearby so that she could watch him grow up, paying them monthly to ensure he was well looked after. He had heard his adoptive parents discussing these payments, and had sought out his birth mother, who realised it was time he took his rightful place in society. Now that he had moved out, the countess had cancelled the payments, and then gone on to murder the count to avoid embarrassing explanations.
