Anne smiled, remembering the urgency of childhood. ‘1 shall get up this instant,’ she promised. ‘With the whole of the house to see, I couldn’t bear to stay in bed a moment longer.’
Chapter Six
On going downstairs, Anne was directed by the butler into the breakfast room, to the right of the octagon room. It was a smaller, square room, very pretty with its walls hung with green silk damask, its decorated ceiling picked out in pink and green, and its row of long windows reaching down to the ground draped with gently blowing white muslin. Here, she learned, the family took their informal meals. There was a large, ‘state’ dining-room on the other side of the octagon room for formal occasions.
The Count and Countess were at breakfast, and both children were sitting and eating with them – another thing Anne had never witnessed in England, where children took all their meals in the nursery. As she entered, the Countess looked up with a smile and said, ‘Oh, Miss Peters, you are up so early! This naughty child of mine woke you – I am so sorry.’
‘No, indeed, madame, I was already awake,’ Anne said hastily. ‘Please don’t scold her.’
The Count, who had risen to his feet, reached across and ruffled Natasha’s curls, and she spared him one golden look from her bowl and spoon. ‘Nevertheless, she must understand that she is not to enter your room again without permission – do you hear me, Nasha?’
‘You call her Nasha?’ Anne enquired as she took the seat a footman was holding out for her.
‘It is a little of a joke,’ the Countess said, with a smile at her husband. ‘In Russian, nasha means ours.’
‘Because I am really only Papa’s,’ Yelena said unconcernedly. ‘My real mother died when I was a baby.’ It was said without any malice, but Anne, glancing at the Countess, saw the serenity of her expression falter just for an instant. From what she had so far observed, the Countess treated Yelena like her own child, and indeed she had heard Yelena call the Countess Mamochka, which was surely a term of endearment. Yet perhaps there was some element of friction between them. It was something to keep in mind as she got to know her new pupil.
For now, she merely said, ‘I see,’ and accepted cutlets and coddled eggs from the footman, grateful that breakfast seemed to be much the same wherever one went in Europe: she preferred dietary experiment to come later in the day, when she felt strong enough to cope with it. There was fragrant coffee, too, and crusty bread, a little darker in colour than English bread, with a denser texture and a delicious, nutty flavour. The children were drinking raspberry juice, and eating curds and pieces of honeycomb.
‘Well, now that you have been woken early,’ the Count said, ‘we must see that the day is put to good use. If you will allow me, Miss Peters, I shall give myself the pleasure of showing you the house and grounds, or as much of them as we can see in one day. Tomorrow, I’m afraid, I must go to Petersburg.’
The Countess gave a little involuntary cry, and then put down her fork and said, ‘Oh, Nikolai, no! So soon?’
‘My dear, I must. But I shall not stay long. I must make my report to the minister and deliver some letters, and then I shall return. After so long away, I think I may be sure of having this summer to myself, at least.’
When they had finished breakfast, the Countess suggested that her husband should show Anne the outside of the house first, and then join her and the children on the terrace later. ‘It will not amuse them to talk of architecture, and I must speak to Vasky and Kerim on domestic matters. You will enjoy it much more on your own. Miss Peters is bound to be a better audience than I, who have heard all the history before.’
The Count pretended hurt. ‘You are bored with my conversation already! Very well, Miss Peters, you and I will go alone and appreciate the architectural marvels of my house. You will find it a novel experience, I promise you!’
Schwartzenturm was certainly an odd-looking house. Seen from the road, the west front had a solidly Palladian central block, three storeys high. The white stone facade was dominated by a central recessed portico, its four massive Ionic columns thrown into sharp relief by the dark, shadowy space of the loggia behind them. ‘Delightful on hot afternoons!’ the Count commented. The columns rose to a perfectly normal entablature and pediment, above and behind which the sloping roof and chimneys peeped coyly.
To either side of the central block were one-storey screen walls, linking it to two pavilions. So far, all was perfectly conventional. But the south pavilion, beginning at ground level as a small echo of its parent block, from the first floor upwards degenerated rapidly into a Rhine schloss, complete with round turrets topped with elaborate wrought-iron decorations. It was as if the original architect had been abruptly dismissed, and hastily replaced by someone homesick for the Black Forest.
The north pavilion did not even begin right. From the ground upwards, it was a round, black stone tower, like a castle keep: massive, plain, and mediaeval, as if hewn from the living rock on which it stood. In a remote and gloomy Scottish glen, it would not have looked out of place, but rising from the meek clay of flat grazing-land, it had a most peculiar effect. ‘This, of course, is the black tower which gives the house its name,’ said the Count.
The curtain walls concealed two courtyards and the necessary jumble of stables, kennels and outbuildings, as could be seen from the other side of the house. It could also be seen that the back of the central block did not match the front, being faced entirely in soft red brick, with plain Queen Anne windows. The three-sided bay of the octagon room, and the French windows of the breakfast room, gave on to a broad terrace with a stone balustrade and a straight drop down to the park, so that the house appeared to be only two storeys high. If the west front had been designed by an Italian classicist, and the pavilions by nostalgic and romantic Germans, then the east front had evidently flowed from the pencil of a homesick Englishman.
‘Palladian palace, Rhineland schloss, Scottish bastion and English country house – who could have put such things together?’ Anne asked, laughing, as she and the Count finished their circuit.
‘The main block was designed by an Italian architect, Gatto, about eighty years ago. It’s actually based on one of Palladio’s villas, the Villa Emo at Fanzolo,’ the Count told her. ‘Soloviev had the estate then, and wanted a summer house close to Petersburg, and commissioned Gatto to build him one. But he died before it was finished, and Prince Chernosov bought it for his wife, who was German by birth – one of the Empress’s ladies-in-waiting – and added the white tower for her, so that she wouldn’t feel homesick.’
‘And the black tower?’
‘The old Princess, the Prince’s mother, added that. She lived here with the Prince and his wife, but after her son died, she grew very strange and gradually retreated from the world. The young Princess only came here in the summer, preferring – despite the white tower! – a modern house in Petersburg, but the old Princess still felt her privacy wasn’t complete enough. So she had the black tower built with her own money, and went and lived in the top of it all alone, seeing no one but the servant who brought her food. She never left her room again until the day she died.’
‘Like a prisoner in a fairy tale,’ Anne said, looking quizzically at the Count, hardly knowing whether to believe him or not. He regarded her seriously, divining her thought.