‘No,’ said Anna, still struggling with the concept of the stiff upper lip as purveyed in her infancy by Pinny and Miss King.
It was Baskerville, never an exponent of silent suffering, who put an end to this by twisting himself out of the earl’s grasp. He would, so long after his suppertime, have marginally preferred a rabbit, but Anna was undoubtedly the next best thing. By the time he had made this clear to her, Anna, trying to save her basket, had lost both her cap and her sang-froid.
‘Oh, chort!’ she said, looking up at her employer through pollen-dusted eyelashes. ‘You have made me so sad.’
‘I?? For God’s sake, Anna.’
‘I was in the dressing room when you boasted to Miss Hardwicke how you have tried to send me away. And I do not know why because I have really tried to work hard and it is true I did not know how to gopher but this turned out not to be at all necessary and though I did play a very little the piano in the music room last week when I was dusting it was only for perhaps three minutes because it was the B flat etude which is very short as you know and in Russia always when we sent away a servant we allowed them first to explain so—’
‘Stop it! Stop it, Anna!’ Rupert reached out, took her by the shoulders. A mistake…More of a mistake than he would have believed possible. He dropped his arms, stepped back. ‘Please, for heaven’s sake, Anna. It wasn’t because I wasn’t satisfied with your work. Your work is excellent. It was because I met someone who’d stayed with you in Petersburg.’
He recounted his conversation with Mr Stewart, to which Anna listened with growing amazement.
‘You wished to dismiss me because Petya had cut his teeth on the Crown of Kazan?’
‘All right, I know it sounds absurd but—’
‘Absurd? It is crazy! Sergei has always said that the English aristocracy have brains like very small aspirins and now I believe it. In any case, the Crown of Kazan was very heavy. Niannka was always angry with Mama when she wore it because it gave her a headache.’
‘Niannka? Is that the lady with the mummified finger?’
Anna dimpled, but her eyes were sad for Niannka’s desertion had hurt more than anything in the dark days of the revolution. ‘Yes. It was the finger of St Nino who lived in the monastery at Varzia where she was born. He has many fingers, that one, perhaps three thousand -the monks are such rogues!’
‘You’ve been there?’
She nodded. ‘We stayed with Niannka when Mama took the waters at Borzhomi. It was very beautiful. We ate with our fingers and slept on the ground and washed in the Kuru, which is very cold and green and runs down from the Caucasus, and the men had great moustaches and got drunk and fell out of their caves,’ said Anna, her face lighting up at the memory. ‘Only the chickens I did not like,’ she added, turning her thumb to reveal a white scar across its base.
‘And it’s certain that she robbed you?’
Anna shrugged. ‘Kira’s aunt saw her on the Anchikov bridge laughing with some soldiers of the Red Guard after we had fled. It is natural, perhaps. She was a woman of the people.’
‘She undoubtedly seems to have been that,’ said Rupert reflectively. Then returning to the attack: ‘Anna, you must see how unsuitable it is, your being here.’
‘No, I do not see it.’ Her eyes kindled. ‘I know. It is because I am a woman! It is all right for Sergei to be chauffeur to an amazingly stupid duchess, though he has seize quarters and his grandfather was a grand duke, and it is all right for Colonel Terek to drive a taxi though his family has owned three-quarters of the Kara Kum, but I … I may not work. Naturally. In a country where women must be trampled to death by ‘orses before they are permitted to vote one would expect this.’
‘No, Anna, you’re wrong. I worked with women in the war — I know very well what they’re capable of.’
‘Then why? Just because we are rich in Petersburg?’
‘Not only rich - Oh, Anna try to understand. In Russia they probably wouldn’t have allowed me over your doorstep.’
‘Pas du tout.’ She dimpled up at him. ‘Mama was extremely democratic. Earls with large estates and many Christian names were frequently admitted. By the front door, even.’
‘Oh, God.’
They had begun to walk between the fragrant bushes, drawn by the remembered perfection of Mr Cameron’s new rose.
‘You really like it here, don’t you?’ said Rupert wonderingly. ‘Though we work you half to death, though your hands are raw and chapped, though you’re cruelly short of sleep…’
They had reached the rose. ‘Yes,’ said Anna so quietly that Rupert had to bend his head to hear. ‘Yes, I like it here. I like Mrs Park who. is so gentle and so good and James who has struggled and struggled to make himself strong. I like the courage of your mother, who is so patient with the spirits who plague her, and I like your uncle who hears music as if each time it had been just composed. I like the warriors on your roof and your foolish dog and the catalpa tree that leans into the lake … And this rose, I like,’ she said, bending in reverence to Mr Cameron’s masterpiece. ‘Yes, very much I like this rose.’
She fell silent. (And if I were to take the secateurs, thought Rupert, and cut each and every blossom from this incomparable bush and pour them in her lap, what then?)
Anna looked up at him. Her face crunched into its monkey smile. ‘And the appendix of Mrs Proom,’ she continued, ‘ah, that I truly love!’
Rupert lifted his hands in a mocking gesture of surrender. ‘Then stay,’ he said, ‘heaven forbid that I should come between you and Mrs Proom’s appendix,’ - and left her.
----*
The dowager was tired. She had spent the morning in the village comforting Mrs Bunford, who was still very much upset at having been asked to make neither the wedding gown nor any of the dresses for the bridesmaids and, to console the widow, had ordered her own outfit of powder blue wild silk. To give Mrs Bunford wild silk to ruin was the act of a lunatic and the dowager was already regretting it. Then as she walked to her brougham she was accosted by tiny, tottery Miss Frensham who had played the organ in Mersham Church for forty years. Miss Frensham, rheuray-eyed and quavery, wanted to know if it was true that Miss Hardwicke wanted neither ‘The Voice That Breathed O’er Eden’ nor the ‘Lohengrin March’ like they always had, but something modern that Miss Frensham was almost sure she wouldn’t be able to play since she couldn’t see too well nowadays to read new music. Because if so, perhaps they’d like to get someone else to play, though it wouldn’t be easy not to see Master Rupert married, not after she’d read him every single page of The Prince and the Pauper when he had the measles, because he always noticed when you missed a bit out, not like other children…
By the time the dowager had soothed Miss Frensham she was late for her appointment with Colonel Forster at the Mill House and must, she realized, have made a mess of explaining why she had to move into the Mill House immediately without waiting for the improvements that the Forsters were so kindly putting in for her, because Colonel Forster had looked at her very strangely and Mrs Forster had patted her hand in quite the wrong way when she left. And when at last she had gone home and sat down for a moment to rest, there had been the usual psychic vibrations and the voice of Hatty Dalrymple had come through as clearly as if she were still beside her in the dormitory all those years ago at school. Hatty, who had passed over as the result of a boating accident at Cowes, had always been a gusher and the information that she could see rays of aetheric ecstacy emanating from Rupert and his lovely, lovely bride did little for the dowager, remembering the look in Rupert’s eyes these days.